I Look at a Unknown Person and Perceive a Known Individual: Am I a Face Recognition Expert?

In my mid-20s, I noticed my elderly relative through the pane of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the year before. I looked intently for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered comparable experiences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" a person I didn't know. Sometimes I could rapidly determine who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – for instance my grandmother. In other instances, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Investigating the Variety of Facial Recognition Capabilities

In recent times, I became curious if other people have these peculiar encounters. When I asked my acquaintances, one said she regularly sees persons in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others sometimes confuse a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Face Identification Skills

Investigators have created many assessments to assess the ability to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to know relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain processes; for instance, there is indication that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these evaluations would shed some light 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 let down – a sentiment that experts say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after analysis of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Rates

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a string of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also astonished. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but seldom misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Potential Explanations

It was proposed that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and retain faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, 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 closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I positioned on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of documented instances all occurred after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

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

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

{Understanding