When I Glance at a Unfamiliar Face and Perceive a Known Individual: Am I a Face Recognition Expert?

Throughout my twenties, I noticed my grandmother through the window of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the year before. I stared for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had analogous occurrences during my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" a person I was unacquainted with. At times I could rapidly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person looked like – such as my grandmother. In other instances, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Variety of Person Recognition Experiences

Lately, I began questioning if different individuals have these peculiar encounters. When I inquired my friends, one said she regularly sees people in random places who look familiar. Others sometimes confuse a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Person Recognition Capacities

Investigators have developed many evaluations to measure the ability to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to know kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for instance, there is evidence 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 Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would shed some light 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 sentiment that researchers say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I received several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after evaluation of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding Incorrect Identification Rates

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a series of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but seldom confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Plausible Explanations

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and commit faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations 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" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of documented instances all took place after a physical event such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

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 sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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

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

{Understanding