When I Glance at a Stranger and Spot a Acquaintance: Could I Be a Super-Recognizer?

In my mid-20s, I noticed my grandma through the glass of a café. I felt astonished – she had departed the year before. I gazed for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered comparable situations during my life. Occasionally, I "identified" a person I had never met. Sometimes I could promptly identify who the stranger resembled – for instance my elderly relative. In other instances, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Examining the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

Lately, I started wondering if other people have these unusual encounters. When I asked my acquaintances, one commented she often sees persons in random places who look recognizable. Others sometimes confuse a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some described completely different responses – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Facial Recognition Skills

Researchers have created many tests to measure the capacity to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to recognize relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the skill to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain functions; for example, there is evidence that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that experts say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that directed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my actual experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after analysis of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping False Alarm Frequencies

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also surprised. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but rarely mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Potential Explanations

It was proposed that I probably possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Research suggests that the latter helps people to develop and store faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was thought 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 closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity 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 "recognize" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all happened after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. 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 few of people with suspected HFF in many years of research.

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

{Understanding