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In my twenties, I noticed my grandmother through the window of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had departed the prior year. I looked intently for a moment, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd had comparable situations all through my life. Periodically, I "identified" someone I didn't know. At times I could promptly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person resembled – like my elderly relative. In other instances, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Variety of Face Identification Capabilities

Lately, I started wondering if different individuals have these odd encounters. When I asked my companions, one commented she frequently sees individuals in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others occasionally misidentify a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some reported no such experiences – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Comprehending the Spectrum of Person Recognition Skills

Researchers have created many assessments to quantify the capacity to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to know relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations 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 "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the skill to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain processes; for example, there is indication that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these assessments would provide insight on why strangers look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a feeling that researchers say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after assessment of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Rates

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also astonished. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but infrequently misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this indicator, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Possible Explanations

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and retain faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", 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 resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of reported cases all happened after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with potential HFF in extended periods of study.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think all visages is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a few times a month.

{Understanding