🔗 Share this article

In my mid-20s, I spotted my grandma through the window of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the prior year. I looked intently for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced comparable situations throughout my life. From time to time, I "recognized" someone I had never met. Sometimes I could quickly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – such as my elderly relative. Other times, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Variety of Facial Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I became curious if others have these odd encounters. When I inquired my friends, one commented she regularly sees persons in unexpected places who look known. Others sometimes misidentify a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Face Identification Abilities

Investigators have developed many assessments to assess the skill to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to recognize family, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the skill to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain mechanisms; for example, there is indication that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Face Identification Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a feeling that scientists say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after analysis of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the old faces, but seldom misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Potential Explanations

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to develop and retain faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating 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. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all occurred after a health incident such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in many years of study.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think every face is recognizable, and others, like me, who only experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding