In her mid-20s, the author was stunned to see her late grandmother through a coffee shop window. Such encounters have happened all her life: every so often she 'recognises' someone she does not know. A friend reports frequently seeing strangers who look familiar, while others never experience this.
Facial recognition abilities vary widely, from super-recognisers who never forget a face to those with prosopagnosia, or face blindness. According to Harvard Medical School cognitive neuroscientist Joseph DeGutis, remembering a face and discerning whether it is new are distinct skills. Research suggests super-recognisers and prosopagnosics perform similarly when judging whether a face is novel, despite their opposite memory abilities.
To investigate, the author took several facial recognition tests. She correctly identified 96% of celebrity faces, and in an old/new face test she remembered 78% of faces, just below the super-recogniser cutoff of roughly 80%. Her false alarm rate – the proportion of new faces mistaken as seen before – was 18%, lower than the average of about 30% across all groups.
DeGutis concluded she is a 'borderline super-recogniser'. He suggests that people with such abilities possess a relatively large, high-resolution catalogue of familiar faces, and are more likely to individuate faces by assigning traits to them. This may explain why a stranger can trigger a powerful sense of familiarity.
The author notes that her scores on the tests were unexpected: she remembered many old faces but rarely mistook a new one for a previously seen face, which makes her real-life experiences all the more puzzling. The exact reasons for her overfamiliarity with strange faces remain unclear, but the findings point to a complex interplay between memory, recognition and emotion.
