Facial Phenomenon

Facial phenomenon, also known as Chvostek's sign, is the illusion of recognizing faces as familiar when in fact the person is seeing them for the first time. This effect was first described by psychologist Fiona Chvosteka in 1989 in her research on facial recognition.

The essence of the facial phenomenon is that people often mistakenly consider unfamiliar faces to be familiar. At the same time, they are sure that they have already seen these faces somewhere before, although in fact this is not the case.

It is believed that the cause of the facial phenomenon is the peculiarities of the brain's functioning when recognizing faces. The brain tends to interpret the features of an unfamiliar face as similar to those of faces it already knows. This creates a feeling of familiarity and the illusion of “false” recognition.

Thus, the facial phenomenon provides an interesting example of how perception and memory can fail us in recognizing faces. It shows that we do not always correctly determine whether a face is familiar to us or not.