When I Glance at a Unknown Person and See a Acquaintance: Might I Qualify as a Super-Recognizer?

In my twenties, I noticed my grandma through the pane of a café. I felt astonished – she had died the year before. I gazed for a moment, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced analogous situations during my life. Periodically, I "recognized" an individual I had never met. Occasionally I could promptly identify who the unknown individual looked like – like my grandmother. Other times, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I became curious if other people have these unusual encounters. When I questioned my friends, one mentioned she regularly sees persons in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others occasionally mistake a stranger or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could effortlessly identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Face Identification Skills

Investigators have developed many tests to quantify the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to know relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the skill to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain mechanisms; for case, there is evidence that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Taking Face Identification Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would provide insight on why strangers look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that researchers say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. 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 exactly identify them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my outcome. But after analysis of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending False Alarm Percentages

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a series of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals 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?

Examining Potential Causes

It was suggested that I probably possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and retain faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", 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 attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Over-familiarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of reported cases all took place after a health incident such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing 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 face identification problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with possible HFF in long durations of investigation.

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

{Understanding