🔗 Share this article

In my twenties, I spotted my grandmother through the window of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had departed the prior year. I gazed for a short time, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered comparable experiences throughout my life. From time to time, I "identified" someone I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could promptly determine who the unfamiliar person resembled – such as my grandmother. Other times, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Examining the Variety of Face Identification Abilities

Lately, I started wondering if others have these odd experiences. When I asked my companions, one commented she regularly sees persons in random places who look recognizable. Others sometimes misidentify a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could effortlessly identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Face Identification Abilities

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

Some evaluations also capture how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the skill to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use different brain functions; for example, there is indication that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Tests

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would provide insight on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that researchers say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my actual experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after assessment of my performance, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a series of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the first set. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Potential Causes

It was proposed that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to learn and commit faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of documented instances all occurred after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing 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 face identification challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with potential HFF in long durations of research.

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

{Understanding