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

In my mid-20s, I spotted my grandmother through the glass of a café. I felt stunned – she had died the year before. I gazed for a short time, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered analogous situations all through my life. Occasionally, I "identified" a person I didn't know. At times I could quickly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – like my grandmother. On other occasions, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Examining the Spectrum of Face Identification Capabilities

Recently, I became curious if different individuals have these odd experiences. When I inquired my acquaintances, one mentioned she often sees persons in random places who look familiar. Others sometimes mistake a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some described nothing of the kind – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum 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 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 perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Scientists have developed many evaluations to quantify the skill to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are super-recognizers, who recall 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 know kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain mechanisms; for example, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt interested whether these tests would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that researchers say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after evaluation of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a string of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but infrequently confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Potential Explanations

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the later element helps people to learn and store faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention 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 disposed to notice the unknown person who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations 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" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences 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 investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using tools 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 occurrence rate 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 undergo it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding