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In my mid-20s, I noticed my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the prior year. I stared for a moment, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered similar situations all through my life. Periodically, I "recognized" an individual I was unacquainted with. At times I could rapidly determine who the unknown individual reminded me of – like my grandmother. In other instances, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Investigating the Spectrum of Face Identification Capabilities

In recent times, I began questioning if other people have these unusual experiences. When I inquired my companions, one commented she regularly sees persons in unexpected places who look known. Others occasionally confuse a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of experiences. 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 beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Facial Recognition Skills

Scientists have created many assessments to measure the skill to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to know relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain mechanisms; for example, there is indication that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these tests would shed some light on why strangers look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that scientists say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after evaluation of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a series of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also surprised. I remembered many of the old faces, but seldom misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Examining Plausible Reasons

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and likely near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and commit faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all took place after a physical event such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in long durations of study.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a range, with some people who think all visages is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding