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During my mid-20s, I noticed my grandmother through the window of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had departed the prior year. I stared for a brief period, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced similar experiences during my life. Periodically, I "recognized" an individual I was unacquainted with. At times I could rapidly determine who the stranger resembled – for instance my grandma. Other times, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Range of Face Identification Experiences

Recently, I started wondering if others have these unusual encounters. When I questioned my companions, one mentioned she frequently sees individuals in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others sometimes confuse a stranger or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds 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.

Grasping the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Investigators have created many assessments to assess the skill to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to recognize family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the capacity to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain mechanisms; for example, there is indication that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a sentiment that scientists say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I received several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, 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 public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after assessment of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Rates

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a string of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the old faces, but seldom mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers 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?

Examining Possible Causes

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to develop and commit 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 thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I stood on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all took place after a physical event such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of investigation.

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

{Understanding