Gazing at a Unknown Person and Spot a Acquaintance: Am I a Face Recognition Expert?

In my young adulthood, I noticed my elderly relative through the glass of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the prior year. I stared for a brief period, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered comparable occurrences throughout my life. From time to time, I "recognized" someone I had never met. At times I could promptly identify who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my grandma. In other instances, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Exploring the Spectrum of Face Identification Capabilities

In recent times, I started wondering if different individuals have these odd experiences. When I asked my companions, one commented she frequently sees persons in random places who look known. Others at times mistake a stranger or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research has found we spend about 14 minutes 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.

Understanding the Range of Person Recognition Capacities

Researchers have developed many evaluations to assess the ability to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to identify kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recall a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for case, there is proof that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Tests

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

I was sent several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from three angles, then find it in arrays. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after assessment of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a series of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also astonished. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but infrequently misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Plausible Explanations

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, assign traits to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to develop and store faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of reported cases all happened after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, 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 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 continuum, with some people who think each countenance is recognizable, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding