Gazing at a Unfamiliar Face and Spot a Acquaintance: Might I Qualify as a Super-Recognizer?
During my twenties, I noticed my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had died the prior year. I gazed for a brief period, then remembered it was impossible to be her.
I'd had comparable occurrences all through my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" an individual I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could rapidly determine who the unfamiliar person resembled – such as my grandmother. Other times, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.
Examining the Variety of Facial Recognition Experiences
Lately, I became curious if other people have these odd situations. When I asked my friends, one commented she frequently sees people in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others occasionally mistake a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some reported no such experiences – they could effortlessly 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 mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.
Understanding the Continuum of Facial Recognition Abilities
Investigators have developed many evaluations to quantify the ability to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to recognize kin, close friends and even themselves.
Some tests also assess how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the skill to recall a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain processes; for example, there is proof that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.
Completing Person Recognition Assessments
I felt curious whether these assessments would shed some light on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that researchers say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.
I received several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that told me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my everyday experience.
I felt less than confident about my performance. But after evaluation of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".
Understanding Incorrect Identification Rates
I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a string of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.
I felt satisfied with my score, but also astonished. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but rarely misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandmother's?
Investigating Possible Reasons
It was proposed that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to learn and store faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.
In moreover, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.
Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces
These evaluations helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all occurred after a health incident such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole adult life.
Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.
Experts have heard from only a few of people with possible HFF in many years of research.
"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 encounter it a several occasions a month.
