🔗 Share this article

In my mid-20s, I noticed my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the previous year. I looked intently for a short time, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd had comparable occurrences throughout my life. Periodically, I "knew" an individual I didn't know. Occasionally I could quickly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – like my grandmother. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Exploring the Variety of Face Identification Capabilities

Recently, I started wondering if other people have these odd situations. When I inquired my friends, one said she frequently sees individuals in random places who look recognizable. Others occasionally misidentify a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described completely different responses – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Face Identification Capacities

Investigators have designed many assessments to measure the ability to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to know family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the skill to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain functions; for case, there is proof that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt curious whether these tests would provide insight on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that experts say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in arrays. 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 quite place them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

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

Grasping Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a series of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also surprised. I remembered many of the old faces, but seldom mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Plausible Reasons

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, assign traits to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and retain faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of reported cases all occurred after a medical episode such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

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

"The frequency 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 several occasions a month.

{Understanding