When I Glance at a Stranger and See a Friend: Might I Qualify as a Super-Recognizer?

During my mid-20s, I observed my grandma through the glass of a café. I felt stunned – she had departed the year before. I stared for a short time, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd had analogous occurrences all through my life. Occasionally, I "identified" a person I didn't know. Occasionally I could promptly determine who the stranger resembled – such as my grandmother. In other instances, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Range of Face Identification Abilities

Lately, I began questioning if others have these unusual situations. When I questioned my companions, one said she frequently sees individuals in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others occasionally confuse a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Face Identification Abilities

Scientists have created many tests to assess the capacity to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to know family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But scientists "haven't extensively researched 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 mechanisms; for case, there is indication that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt curious whether these assessments would offer understanding on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that experts say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, then find it in groups. During another test that told me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after evaluation of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they review a string of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but infrequently misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Plausible Causes

It was suggested that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and store faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition 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 "identify" strangers. Examining further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of documented instances all happened after a medical episode such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including sight abnormalities, 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 possible HFF in extended periods 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 recognizable, and others, like me, who only undergo it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding