When I Glance at a Unknown Person and Spot a Known Individual: Am I a Super-Recognizer?

In my twenties, I spotted my grandmother through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had departed the prior year. I gazed for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd had analogous occurrences during my life. Periodically, I "recognized" a person I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could rapidly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – like my grandma. In other instances, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Investigating the Variety of Face Identification Capabilities

Lately, I started wondering if other people have these peculiar experiences. When I asked my companions, one said she often sees persons in random places who look known. Others at times confuse a stranger or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some reported no such experiences – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies 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 interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Person Recognition Skills

Researchers have designed many assessments to quantify the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to know relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the skill to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain processes; for example, there is indication that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Face Identification Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these tests would offer understanding on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that researchers say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in lineups. During another test that directed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after evaluation of my performance, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding False Alarm Percentages

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also astonished. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, 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 mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Plausible Explanations

It was suggested that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and commit faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of documented instances all took place after a physical event such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing 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 difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible HFF in extended periods of investigation.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a range, with some people who think each countenance is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding