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Throughout my twenties, I spotted my grandmother through the pane of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the year before. I stared for a short time, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered comparable experiences all through my life. Occasionally, I "identified" someone I didn't know. Occasionally I could quickly identify who the unfamiliar person looked like – such as my grandmother. On other occasions, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I started wondering if different individuals have these peculiar encounters. When I inquired my acquaintances, one said she frequently sees persons in random places who look recognizable. Others sometimes misidentify a stranger or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

Investigators have developed many evaluations to assess the skill to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to identify kin, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the ability to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain processes; for case, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would provide insight on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a sentiment that scientists say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent 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 grayscale photos of a face from three angles, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after evaluation of my performance, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a string of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also surprised. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, 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 grandmother's?

Investigating Potential Causes

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and store faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", 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 carefully at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" strangers. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of reported cases all happened after a medical episode such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

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

"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 known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a few times a month.

{Understanding