Gazing at a Unknown Person and Perceive a Friend: Could I Be a Exceptional Facial Identifier?

In my twenties, I noticed my grandmother through the pane of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the previous year. I looked intently for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered comparable situations throughout my life. Periodically, I "recognized" someone I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could rapidly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – for instance my grandmother. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Examining the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I began questioning if others have these peculiar experiences. When I questioned my friends, one mentioned she frequently sees persons in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others occasionally mistake a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported completely different responses – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma 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 err sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Spectrum of Person Recognition Skills

Investigators have designed many tests to quantify the ability to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to identify kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use different brain processes; for example, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Tests

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would shed some light on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that experts say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several face identification tests. I waded 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 groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my everyday experience.

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

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the old faces, but rarely confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Possible Reasons

It was proposed that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to learn and retain faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who looks like my grandmother. 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 tests helped me understand where I stood on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of documented instances all took place after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected HFF in long durations of study.

"The prevalence 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 familiar, and others, like me, who only undergo it a few times a month.

{Understanding