I Look at a Stranger and Spot a Friend: Could I Be a Face Recognition Expert?

Throughout my young adulthood, I spotted my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had passed away the previous year. I gazed for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had similar experiences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "identified" someone I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could quickly pinpoint who the stranger resembled – like my grandma. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Investigating the Variety of Facial Recognition Experiences

Lately, I began questioning if other people have these unusual experiences. When I inquired my acquaintances, one commented she regularly sees persons in unexpected places who look familiar. Others at times mistake a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some reported completely different responses – they could effortlessly identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Facial Recognition Capacities

Scientists have designed many assessments to quantify the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to recognize relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. But researchers "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain processes; for example, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these tests would shed some light on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that experts say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in lineups. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after assessment of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a series of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

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

Investigating Potential Explanations

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and store faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice 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 elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Over-familiarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Examining further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of documented instances all happened after a health incident such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. 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 small number of people with suspected HFF in many years of research.

"The occurrence rate 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 familiar, and others, like me, who only undergo it a few times a month.

{Understanding