I Look at a Unknown Person and See a Acquaintance: Am I a Face Recognition Expert?

In my twenties, I spotted my grandma through the window of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had died the prior year. I stared for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered analogous experiences all through my life. From time to time, I "recognized" an individual I didn't know. Occasionally I could promptly identify who the stranger resembled – like my grandma. In other instances, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I started wondering if different individuals have these peculiar encounters. When I asked my companions, one mentioned she regularly sees people in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others at times misidentify a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Face Identification Capacities

Scientists have developed many assessments to measure the ability to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to know relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But researchers "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the skill to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for case, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that experts say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, 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 real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after evaluation of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The determination 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 participant looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a string of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also astonished. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but rarely mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, 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 elderly relative's?

Exploring Plausible Explanations

It was theorized that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and store faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", 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 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 facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity 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 "identify" strangers. Researching further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of documented instances all happened after a physical event such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

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

"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 known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding