🔗 Share this article

During my young adulthood, I noticed my grandma through the pane of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the prior year. I stared for a brief period, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered similar experiences during my life. From time to time, I "knew" a person I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could promptly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – for instance my elderly relative. On other occasions, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Range of Facial Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I became curious if others have these peculiar experiences. When I asked my friends, one commented she regularly sees individuals in unexpected places who look familiar. Others sometimes mistake a stranger or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some described nothing of the kind – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Scientific investigation 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 experience the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Face Identification Skills

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

Some tests also assess how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the skill to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain functions; for example, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Face Identification Tests

I felt intrigued whether these tests would provide insight on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that researchers say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in lineups. During another test that instructed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after analysis of my performance, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping False Alarm Percentages

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a series of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 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 satisfied with my score, but also surprised. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Possible Reasons

It was theorized that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and store faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, 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 carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of reported cases all happened after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with potential HFF in many years of study.

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

{Understanding