I Look at a Unfamiliar Face and Perceive a Known Individual: Am I a Exceptional Facial Identifier?

In my mid-20s, I noticed my elderly relative through the window of a café. I felt astonished – she had died the prior year. I looked intently for a moment, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered analogous situations all through my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" someone I didn't know. Sometimes I could promptly identify who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my grandmother. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Examining the Spectrum of Person Recognition Experiences

Recently, I became curious if others have these peculiar situations. When I asked my acquaintances, one said she frequently sees people in unexpected places who look familiar. Others sometimes misidentify a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour 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 interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capacities

Investigators have developed many tests to quantify the skill to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to recognize kin, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for instance, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Evaluations

I felt interested whether these tests would offer understanding on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they recall 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 recognizable.

I obtained several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after analysis of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding False Alarm Rates

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a string of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

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

Investigating Plausible Explanations

It was proposed that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to learn and commit 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 furthermore, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity 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 "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all took place after a medical episode such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole adult life.

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 sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with possible HFF in long durations of study.

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

{Understanding