🔗 Share this article

In my mid-20s, I noticed my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had departed the year before. I gazed for a short time, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had comparable occurrences during my life. Occasionally, I "identified" an individual I had never met. Sometimes I could quickly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person resembled – like my grandma. On other occasions, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Investigating the Variety of Face Identification Experiences

Lately, I became curious if others have these odd situations. When I inquired my friends, one said she often sees individuals in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others sometimes mistake a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? 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 interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Skills

Researchers have created many evaluations to quantify the skill to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to recognize kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain mechanisms; for instance, there is proof that superior face rememberers 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 Assessments

I felt curious whether these tests would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a sentiment that scientists say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from three angles, then find it in groups. During another test that directed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – comparable to my actual experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after assessment of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a series of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also surprised. I remembered many of the old faces, but seldom misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Possible Reasons

It was suggested that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, assign traits to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and retain faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus 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 prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all occurred after a health incident such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with possible HFF in extended periods of study.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a continuum, with some people who think all visages is known, and others, like me, who only experience it a few times a month.

{Understanding