I Look at a Unfamiliar Face and Spot a Known Individual: Could I Be a Super-Recognizer?

Throughout my mid-20s, I spotted my grandmother through the glass of a café. I felt astonished – she had passed away the prior year. I stared for a moment, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd had analogous occurrences all through my life. From time to time, I "recognized" a person I had never met. Occasionally I could promptly identify who the stranger looked like – like my grandma. Other times, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I became curious if others have these odd situations. When I questioned my companions, one mentioned she often sees individuals in random places who look familiar. Others at times confuse a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative 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 beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Face Identification Abilities

Scientists have designed many tests to quantify the capacity to recall faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to identify relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the ability to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use different brain mechanisms; for instance, there is proof that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Face Identification Assessments

I felt curious whether these assessments would offer understanding on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that researchers say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent 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 told me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after evaluation of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending False Alarm Rates

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a string of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the old faces, but rarely confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Plausible Explanations

It was theorized that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and commit faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", 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 attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" strangers. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all happened after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible HFF in long durations of research.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a range, with some people who think every face is familiar, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding