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Throughout my young adulthood, I spotted my grandmother through the glass of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the previous year. I stared for a moment, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had analogous occurrences throughout my life. Periodically, I "recognized" an individual I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could rapidly identify who the stranger looked like – such as my elderly relative. Other times, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I began questioning if others have these unusual experiences. When I questioned my acquaintances, one said she often sees individuals in random places who look familiar. Others sometimes misidentify a stranger or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some described no such experiences – they could effortlessly identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Person Recognition Abilities

Researchers have designed many tests to assess the ability to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to identify family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain mechanisms; for case, there is proof that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Tests

I felt curious whether these tests would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that scientists say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I received several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. 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 – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after assessment of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending False Alarm Percentages

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also astonished. I recalled many of the old faces, but rarely confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Plausible Explanations

It was proposed that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and likely near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Research suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and commit faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was considered 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 attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of reported cases all happened after a physical event such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with possible HFF in many years of investigation.

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

{Understanding