Gazing at a Stranger and See a Known Individual: Might I Qualify as a Face Recognition Expert?

During my mid-20s, I spotted my grandma through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had died the previous year. I gazed for a short time, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd had analogous occurrences all through my life. Periodically, I "knew" someone I didn't know. Sometimes I could rapidly determine who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – such as my elderly relative. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Examining the Spectrum of Face Identification Capabilities

Recently, I became curious if others have these unusual experiences. When I asked my friends, one mentioned she often sees persons in unexpected places who look familiar. Others occasionally mistake a stranger or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued 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 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 perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Person Recognition Skills

Scientists have created many evaluations to assess the skill to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to recognize family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the ability to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain functions; for example, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Tests

I felt curious whether these evaluations would provide insight on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that researchers say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled 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 arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my actual experience.

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

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a series of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the old faces, but rarely mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Examining Potential Reasons

It was theorized that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to develop and retain faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", 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 inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of reported cases all happened after a physical event such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. 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 many years of investigation.

"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 familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a few times a month.

{Understanding