Gazing at a Unknown Person and Perceive a Known Individual: Might I Qualify as a Super-Recognizer?

During my young adulthood, I spotted my grandma through the glass of a café. I felt stunned – she had died the year before. I stared for a moment, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had comparable experiences all through my life. From time to time, I "identified" an individual I didn't know. Sometimes I could rapidly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person looked like – such as my elderly relative. In other instances, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Examining the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I became curious if other people have these peculiar situations. When I questioned my companions, one said she often sees persons in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others occasionally confuse a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported no such experiences – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Understanding the Range of Face Identification Skills

Investigators have created many tests to assess the skill to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to recognize kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the skill to recall a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain functions; for example, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these assessments would shed some light on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a sentiment that researchers say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, 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 precisely recognize them – comparable to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after analysis of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The participant 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 initial collection plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the first set. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also astonished. I recalled many of the old faces, but seldom misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, 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 confusing a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Potential Explanations

It was theorized that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and store faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat 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 syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all occurred after a medical episode such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with potential HFF in extended periods of study.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a range, with some people who think all visages is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding