🔗 Share this article

Throughout my mid-20s, I noticed my grandmother through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had departed the prior year. I looked intently for a brief period, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd had analogous experiences all through my life. From time to time, I "knew" an individual I didn't know. Occasionally I could promptly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – like my elderly relative. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Examining the Variety of Person Recognition Abilities

Recently, I started wondering if other people have these odd situations. When I questioned my acquaintances, one commented she frequently sees people in random places who look recognizable. Others sometimes confuse a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour 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 experience the same thing.

Understanding the Range of Facial Recognition Skills

Investigators have developed many evaluations to assess the capacity to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to know kin, dear acquaintances 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 suspect I fall short. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the skill to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain functions; for case, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt interested whether these tests would shed some light on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a feeling that scientists say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my real-life experience.

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

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a series of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 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 content with my performance, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the old faces, but infrequently misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Examining Possible Causes

It was theorized that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and retain faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was believed 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 identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of reported cases all happened after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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

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

{Understanding