🔗 Share this article

In my mid-20s, I observed my grandmother through the pane of a café. I felt stunned – she had departed the year before. I gazed for a moment, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered similar occurrences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "knew" a person I had never met. Sometimes I could rapidly identify who the stranger resembled – like my elderly relative. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Investigating the Variety of Person Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I became curious if other people have these unusual encounters. When I asked my friends, one said she regularly sees people in unexpected places who look known. Others at times confuse a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Investigators have designed many assessments to quantify the ability to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to identify relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the skill to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain mechanisms; for case, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Tests

I felt interested whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that scientists say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling confused 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 groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – comparable to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after analysis of my performance, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding False Alarm Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a string of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the old faces, but infrequently mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Plausible Explanations

It was suggested that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to develop and store faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", 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 disposed to notice the unknown person who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of documented instances all happened after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in many years of research.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a range, with some people who think each countenance is recognizable, and others, like me, who only encounter it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding