I Look at a Unfamiliar Face and See a Known Individual: Might I Qualify as a Face Recognition Expert?

Throughout my young adulthood, I noticed my elderly relative through the window of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had passed away the year before. I looked intently for a moment, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had similar situations throughout my life. From time to time, I "recognized" someone I had never met. Occasionally I could promptly identify who the unknown individual resembled – like my elderly relative. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Range of Face Identification Capabilities

In recent times, I began questioning if other people have these unusual encounters. When I inquired my companions, one said she often sees people in unexpected places who look known. Others at times confuse a stranger or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Investigators have developed many assessments to assess the skill to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recall 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 know kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the capacity to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain mechanisms; for example, there is evidence that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these tests 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 remember me, and feel let down – a feeling that researchers say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after evaluation 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 Rates

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a string of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also surprised. I recognized many of the old faces, but infrequently confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Examining Possible Causes

It was proposed that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the later element helps people to develop and commit faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of documented instances all occurred after a medical episode such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of research.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a continuum, with some people who think each countenance is recognizable, and others, like me, who only encounter it a few times a month.

{Understanding