🔗 Share this article

In my twenties, I observed my grandma through the window of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the prior year. I gazed for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had similar occurrences during my life. From time to time, I "identified" a person I had never met. Occasionally I could rapidly identify who the unknown individual reminded me of – for instance my grandma. Other times, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Examining the Range of Person Recognition Experiences

Lately, I began questioning if other people have these peculiar experiences. When I asked my acquaintances, one commented she often sees persons in random places who look familiar. Others at times misidentify a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Researchers have developed many tests to measure the ability to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to recognize relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain functions; for example, there is evidence that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt interested whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a sentiment that experts say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that told me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after evaluation of my results, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping False Alarm Rates

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a series of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also surprised. I recognized many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Plausible Explanations

It was suggested that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and store faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who resembles my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all occurred after a physical event such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with possible HFF in extended periods of study.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think all visages is recognizable, and others, like me, who only encounter it a few times a month.

{Understanding