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Throughout my twenties, I observed my grandmother through the pane of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had died the year before. I gazed for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced analogous situations throughout my life. Periodically, I "recognized" an individual I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could quickly identify who the stranger resembled – such as my grandmother. Other times, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Investigating the Spectrum of Face Identification Capabilities

Lately, I became curious if others have these peculiar encounters. When I inquired my acquaintances, one mentioned she often sees individuals in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others sometimes confuse a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some described completely different responses – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research has found we spend about 14 minutes 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 interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Person Recognition Skills

Investigators have developed many assessments to quantify the capacity to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to identify family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the skill to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain processes; for instance, there is evidence that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Face Identification Assessments

I felt interested whether these assessments would provide insight on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that experts say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped 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 arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my outcome. But after assessment of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a string of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the first set. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also astonished. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Potential Explanations

It was theorized that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and commit faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" strangers. Researching further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of reported cases all happened after a medical episode such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

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

"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 familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding