Throughout my twenties, I spotted my elderly relative through the glass of a café. I felt stunned – she had passed away the year before. I gazed for a brief period, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.
I'd experienced comparable situations during my life. Periodically, I "identified" a person I didn't know. Sometimes I could rapidly pinpoint who the unknown individual resembled – for instance my elderly relative. Other times, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.
In recent times, I became curious if other people have these unusual encounters. When I inquired my friends, one commented she regularly sees individuals in random places who look recognizable. Others sometimes mistake a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described completely different responses – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.
I felt fascinated by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.
Scientists have created many tests to assess the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to identify family, intimate companions and even themselves.
Some assessments also capture how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the ability to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain functions; for case, there is indication that super-recognizers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.
I felt interested whether these assessments would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a sentiment that experts say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.
I obtained several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling confused 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 lineups. During another test that directed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my actual experience.
I felt uncertain about my performance. But after assessment of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".
I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a series of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.
I felt satisfied with my score, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but rarely mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?
It was suggested that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and store faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.
In addition, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more false alarm 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 looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.
These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of reported cases all happened after a physical event such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.
Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of face identification challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.
Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in many years of study.
"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a range, with some people who think every face is recognizable, and others, like me, who only encounter it a few times a month.
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