When I Glance at a Stranger and Perceive a Known Individual: Could I Be a Super-Recognizer?

Throughout my mid-20s, I spotted my elderly relative through the window of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the previous year. I gazed for a short time, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had analogous experiences during my life. Occasionally, I "knew" a person I had never met. Occasionally I could promptly identify who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – such as my grandmother. On other occasions, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Examining the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capabilities

In recent times, I began questioning if other people have these odd situations. When I questioned my friends, one commented she often sees people in unpredictable places who look known. Others at times confuse a unknown person or celebrity 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 intrigued by this range of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research 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 interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

Investigators have created many tests to measure the ability to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to identify relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the ability to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain processes; for example, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these tests would offer understanding on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that experts say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after assessment of my performance, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also astonished. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but infrequently confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Possible Reasons

It was proposed that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to develop and commit faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who resembles my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. 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 hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all happened after a physical event such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with possible HFF in extended periods of study.

"The frequency 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 experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding