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Throughout my twenties, I observed my elderly relative through the pane of a café. I felt stunned – she had departed the previous year. I gazed for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had comparable experiences all through my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" an individual I had never met. At times I could quickly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my grandmother. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Experiences

Recently, I became curious if others have these odd situations. When I questioned my companions, one mentioned she frequently sees people in unpredictable places who look known. Others at times mistake a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some described completely different responses – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Investigators have developed many tests to assess the capacity to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to identify kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the ability to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain functions; for instance, there is indication that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt curious whether these assessments would provide insight on why strangers look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that experts say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I received several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that directed me to pick out public figures 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 results. But after assessment of my scores, I had accurately recognized 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 previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine 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 remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also astonished. I recognized many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Plausible Reasons

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to develop and commit faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

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

Researching Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all happened after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, 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 known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in many years of study.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think each countenance is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding