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

During my mid-20s, I noticed my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had died the previous year. I gazed for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered similar situations throughout my life. Periodically, I "knew" an individual I had never met. At times I could promptly determine who the stranger reminded me of – such as my grandmother. Other times, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Investigating the Range of Facial Recognition Experiences

Recently, I became curious if other people have these odd situations. When I inquired my friends, one commented she frequently sees individuals in unpredictable places who look known. Others sometimes mistake a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some reported completely different responses – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Skills

Scientists have designed many evaluations to assess the capacity to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to know relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the skill to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain mechanisms; for instance, there is evidence that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Face Identification Tests

I felt curious whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a emotion that experts say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I received several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling stumped 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 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 – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after evaluation of my results, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a series of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also surprised. I recognized many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Possible Reasons

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and store faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all happened after a medical episode such as a seizure or brain attack, 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 person recognition challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in many years of investigation.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think all visages is familiar, and others, like me, who only undergo it a few times a month.

{Understanding