I Look at a Unknown Person and See a Friend: Could I Be a Super-Recognizer?

During my young adulthood, I spotted my elderly relative through the glass of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the prior year. I gazed for a moment, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered comparable situations during my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" someone I didn't know. Sometimes I could promptly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person looked like – like my elderly relative. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Range of Face Identification Abilities

Recently, I began questioning if other people have these peculiar situations. When I inquired my acquaintances, one commented she frequently sees persons in random places who look familiar. Others at times mistake a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just yearning 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 have inaccuracies sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capacities

Investigators have designed many assessments to measure the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to identify family, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain processes; for instance, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt curious whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that scientists say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from three angles, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after assessment of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Rates

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they review a sequence of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also astonished. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Potential Causes

It was suggested that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and store faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of reported cases all occurred after a medical episode such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in many years of study.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think each countenance is recognizable, and others, like me, who only undergo it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding