Gazing at a Stranger and Perceive a Acquaintance: Might I Qualify as a Exceptional Facial Identifier?

In my young adulthood, I noticed my elderly relative through the window of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had died the prior year. I gazed for a moment, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered analogous occurrences all through my life. Occasionally, I "knew" a person I had never met. Occasionally I could rapidly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my grandmother. In other instances, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

Recently, I began questioning if other people have these unusual experiences. When I inquired my companions, one commented she regularly sees individuals in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others occasionally misidentify a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described completely different responses – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour 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 experience the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

Researchers have designed many evaluations to assess the skill to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to identify kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the skill to recall 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 recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a emotion that scientists say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

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 monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my outcome. But after analysis of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Rates

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a series of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also astonished. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Potential Causes

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and retain faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating 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 "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of documented instances all occurred after a health incident such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with suspected HFF in long durations of investigation.

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

{Understanding