When I Glance at a Unfamiliar Face and See a Acquaintance: Could I Be a Super-Recognizer?

In my young adulthood, I spotted my grandmother through the glass of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the year before. I gazed for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered similar occurrences during my life. Occasionally, I "knew" someone I didn't know. Sometimes I could rapidly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my grandma. In other instances, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Variety of Facial Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I began questioning if other people have these odd situations. When I questioned my friends, one said she often sees individuals in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others occasionally misidentify a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some described completely different responses – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Face Identification Skills

Investigators have designed many tests to quantify the skill to recall faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to recognize family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the skill to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain functions; for instance, there is indication that super-recognizers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would provide insight on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a feeling that experts say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed 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 real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after assessment of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding False Alarm Rates

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also astonished. I remembered many of the old faces, but seldom misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Potential Reasons

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, assign traits to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and retain faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who resembles my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged 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 "know" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of documented instances all took place after a physical event such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a range, with some people who think every face is known, and others, like me, who only encounter it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding