In my young adulthood, I observed my grandma through the glass of a café. I felt stunned – she had died the previous year. I looked intently for a short time, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.
I'd had similar occurrences during my life. Periodically, I "knew" an individual I had never met. At times I could rapidly identify who the stranger resembled – such as my grandma. Other times, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.
Lately, I began questioning if other people have these odd encounters. When I inquired my friends, one mentioned she often sees individuals in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others at times misidentify a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described no such experiences – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.
I felt intrigued by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour 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 experience the same thing.
Scientists have designed many assessments to assess the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to identify kin, intimate companions and even themselves.
Some evaluations also measure how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But scientists "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 abilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for example, there is indication that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recognize old faces.
I felt interested whether these assessments would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a feeling that experts say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.
I obtained several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my everyday experience.
I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after analysis of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".
I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.
I felt pleased with my score, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?
It was suggested that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and retain faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.
In furthermore, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", 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 carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.
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. Examining further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all occurred after a medical episode such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.
Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.
Experts have heard from only a few of people with suspected HFF in long durations of research.
"The frequency 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 experience it a few times a month.
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