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Throughout my twenties, I observed my grandma through the pane of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the previous year. I looked intently for a short time, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered similar occurrences during my life. From time to time, I "identified" a person I didn't know. Sometimes I could quickly determine who the unknown individual reminded me of – such as my grandmother. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Range of Face Identification Capabilities

Lately, I began questioning if different individuals have these unusual encounters. When I asked my companions, one mentioned she often sees persons in random places who look known. Others sometimes mistake a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Person Recognition Capacities

Investigators have created many tests to assess the ability to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to know family, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the skill to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain processes; for case, there is proof that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Tests

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that researchers say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I received several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in lineups. During another test that directed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after evaluation of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the first set. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the old faces, but rarely confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Possible Causes

It was suggested that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and commit faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations 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" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all took place after a medical episode such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

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 theorized that there may be a range, with some people who think each countenance is familiar, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding