🔗 Share this article

During my twenties, I observed my elderly relative through the window of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had passed away the previous year. I gazed for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered comparable situations all through my life. From time to time, I "identified" an individual I didn't know. At times I could promptly pinpoint who the unknown individual resembled – such as my grandmother. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Examining the Variety of Face Identification Abilities

Recently, I began questioning if others have these peculiar situations. When I asked my companions, one said she frequently sees individuals in random places who look known. Others occasionally confuse a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some described completely different responses – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? 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 experience the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Investigators have designed many assessments to quantify the skill to recall faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to recognize family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain processes; for example, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Tests

I felt curious whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a emotion that scientists say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several face identification tests. I completed 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 told 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 – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after analysis of my results, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Rates

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a sequence 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 recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also astonished. I recognized many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Examining Potential Causes

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the later element helps people to develop and store faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who resembles my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching 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 "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of documented instances all took place after a physical event such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

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

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think all visages is recognizable, and others, like me, who only encounter it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding