When I Glance at a Unfamiliar Face and See a Acquaintance: Might I Qualify as a Face Recognition Expert?

In my twenties, I noticed my elderly relative through the pane of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the prior year. I looked intently for a short time, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced similar situations all through my life. Occasionally, I "knew" a person I had never met. At times I could promptly determine who the unknown individual reminded me of – like my elderly relative. On other occasions, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Examining the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Recently, I began questioning if other people have these odd experiences. When I questioned my companions, one said she regularly sees individuals in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others at times misidentify a stranger or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some reported no such experiences – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds 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 perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Person Recognition Skills

Investigators have designed many tests to measure the skill to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to identify kin, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain functions; for instance, there is evidence that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these tests would shed some light on why strangers look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a feeling that experts say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, then find it in lineups. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after evaluation of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a series of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also astonished. I recalled many of the old faces, but seldom confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Possible Causes

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue 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, assign traits to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and store faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of reported cases all happened after a medical episode such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, 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 facial recall assessment.

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

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

{Understanding