Throughout my mid-20s, I observed my grandma through the window of a café. I felt astonished – she had passed away the previous year. I stared for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.
I'd encountered comparable situations all through my life. Occasionally, I "knew" an individual I didn't know. At times I could quickly determine who the unfamiliar person resembled – for instance my grandma. On other occasions, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.
Recently, I became curious if other people have these peculiar encounters. When I questioned my friends, one said she frequently sees people in unexpected places who look known. Others sometimes mistake a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described 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 elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research has found we spend about 14 minutes 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 experience the same thing.
Researchers have designed many assessments to quantify the capacity to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to identify relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.
Some tests also assess how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the skill to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for case, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.
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 recall me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that experts say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.
I was sent several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled 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 lineups. During another test that directed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my real-life experience.
I felt uncertain about my performance. But after evaluation of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".
I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.
I felt satisfied with my score, but also astonished. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but infrequently confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this indicator, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?
It was theorized that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and commit faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.
In furthermore, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.
These evaluations 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" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of reported cases all occurred after a health incident such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.
Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.
Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible HFF in many years of investigation.
"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think each countenance is recognizable, and others, like me, who only encounter it a multiple instances a month.
A tech enthusiast and writer passionate about emerging technologies and their impact on society, with a background in software development.
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