🔗 Share this article

In my twenties, I spotted my elderly relative through the glass of a café. I felt astonished – she had died the prior year. I stared for a short time, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd had similar experiences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "identified" an individual I had never met. Occasionally I could rapidly identify who the stranger reminded me of – such as my grandmother. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Variety of Face Identification Experiences

Lately, I began questioning if other people have these peculiar experiences. When I inquired my friends, one said she often sees people in unexpected places who look familiar. Others at times mistake a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Range of Face Identification Skills

Investigators have created many evaluations to quantify the capacity to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to know relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain mechanisms; for case, there is proof that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these assessments would offer understanding on why strangers look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a emotion that scientists say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, then find it in arrays. 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 exactly identify them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after evaluation of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending False Alarm Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a series of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also astonished. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but infrequently confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Possible Reasons

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, assign traits to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and store faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all happened after a physical event such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with potential HFF in extended periods of study.

"The frequency 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 recognizable, and others, like me, who only encounter it a few times a month.

{Understanding