🔗 Share this article

In my young adulthood, I spotted my elderly relative through the window of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had passed away the previous year. I stared for a brief period, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced comparable occurrences throughout my life. From time to time, I "knew" a person I had never met. Sometimes I could rapidly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my elderly relative. Other times, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I became curious if others have these peculiar encounters. When I inquired my acquaintances, one mentioned she frequently sees individuals in random places who look recognizable. Others sometimes confuse a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some described completely different responses – they could readily distinguish 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 grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Person Recognition Capacities

Investigators have designed many evaluations to assess the capacity to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to identify kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

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

Undergoing Face Identification Evaluations

I felt curious whether these tests would shed some light on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that scientists say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after evaluation of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a series of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the first set. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the old faces, but infrequently confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Potential Causes

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Research suggests that the latter helps people to learn and retain faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" strangers. Researching further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all took place after a health incident such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of research.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a range, with some people who think all visages is known, and others, like me, who only encounter it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding