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During my young adulthood, I observed my grandma through the window of a café. I felt stunned – she had died the prior year. I stared for a short time, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced analogous experiences all through my life. From time to time, I "identified" someone I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could promptly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my grandma. Other times, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I began questioning if different individuals have these odd experiences. When I asked my companions, one mentioned she frequently sees persons in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others at times confuse a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Face Identification Abilities

Investigators have designed many evaluations to measure the ability 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 long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to recognize kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain functions; for case, there is proof that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Face Identification Assessments

I felt curious whether these assessments would shed some light on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that scientists say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, 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 – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after assessment of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Rates

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a string of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the old faces, but rarely misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Potential Reasons

It was theorized that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and store faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", 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 looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat 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 condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of reported cases all happened after a medical episode such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances 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 hypothesized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think each countenance is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding