Throughout my twenties, I observed my grandma through the window of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had died the year before. I looked intently for a short time, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.
I'd experienced analogous situations during my life. Occasionally, I "identified" someone I had never met. Sometimes I could quickly determine who the stranger looked like – like my grandmother. Other times, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.
Examining the Spectrum of Person Recognition Experiences
Lately, I began questioning if others have these peculiar experiences. When I questioned my friends, one mentioned she regularly sees people in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others sometimes mistake a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.
I felt intrigued by this diversity of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.
Grasping the Continuum of Person Recognition Abilities
Investigators have developed many evaluations to quantify the ability to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.
Some evaluations also assess how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the skill to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain processes; for example, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.
Undergoing Person Recognition Assessments
I felt curious whether these tests would shed some light on why strangers look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that scientists say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.
I was sent several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my actual experience.
I felt uncertain about my results. But after assessment of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".
Understanding False Alarm Percentages
I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a series of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.
I felt content with my result, but also surprised. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but seldom misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my elderly relative's?
Investigating Plausible Causes
It was suggested that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and commit faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.
In addition, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.
Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces
These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of reported cases all occurred after a physical event such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing 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 difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the facial recall assessment.
Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in many years of study.
"The occurrence rate 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 familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a multiple instances a month.
