During my mid-20s, I observed my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the previous year. I stared for a moment, then recalled it was impossible to be her.
I'd encountered analogous occurrences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" someone I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could promptly pinpoint who the unknown individual reminded me of – such as my grandma. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.
Recently, I started wondering if others have these peculiar encounters. When I inquired my acquaintances, one said she frequently sees persons in random places who look familiar. Others occasionally confuse a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some described completely different responses – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.
I felt intrigued by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour 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 perceive the same thing.
Researchers have developed many assessments to measure the capacity to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to identify family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.
Some evaluations also measure how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the skill to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain functions; for example, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.
I felt interested whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that researchers say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.
I was sent several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out famous people 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 doubtful about my outcome. But after analysis of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".
I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they review a series of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.
I felt satisfied with my performance, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but infrequently misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, 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 mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?
It was suggested that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and commit faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.
In addition, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.
These tests 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" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of documented instances all happened after a health incident such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole adult life.
Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.
Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of study.
"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think all visages is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.
An avid hiker and nature photographer with a passion for exploring the Italian Alps and sharing travel insights.
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