Gazing at a Stranger and Spot a Known Individual: Am I a Exceptional Facial Identifier?

Throughout my mid-20s, I noticed my grandma through the pane of a café. I felt astonished – she had died the year before. I gazed for a short time, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd had similar occurrences during my life. From time to time, I "knew" someone I had never met. Occasionally I could promptly pinpoint who the stranger reminded me of – like my grandma. In other instances, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Range of Facial Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I began questioning if other people have these peculiar situations. When I inquired my acquaintances, one commented she regularly sees persons in random places who look recognizable. Others occasionally mistake a stranger or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Person Recognition Abilities

Investigators have designed many tests to assess the skill to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to recognize relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the skill to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for case, there is proof that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Face Identification Evaluations

I felt interested whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a emotion that experts say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree 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 three angles, 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 known, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my real-life experience.

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

Comprehending False Alarm Percentages

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a series of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also surprised. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but infrequently mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Possible Explanations

It was theorized that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to learn and commit faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all took place after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

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

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a continuum, with some people who think all visages is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding