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During my mid-20s, I noticed my grandmother through the pane of a café. I felt stunned – she had departed the prior year. I looked intently for a short time, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd had analogous occurrences all through my life. Occasionally, I "identified" someone I didn't know. Sometimes I could promptly pinpoint who the stranger resembled – like my grandma. On other occasions, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Range of Person Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I started wondering if different individuals have these odd situations. When I questioned my acquaintances, one said she frequently sees individuals in random places who look familiar. Others sometimes mistake a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Face Identification Abilities

Scientists have developed many evaluations to quantify the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: 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 prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize family, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how skilled someone is at recognizing 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 examined the capacity to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain processes; for case, there is evidence that super-recognizers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these tests would shed some light on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that scientists say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale 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 familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after analysis of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping False Alarm Frequencies

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they review a sequence of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also astonished. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but rarely misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a stranger's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Potential Reasons

It was theorized that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and store faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who resembles 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.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all took place after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity 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 person recognition problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

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

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think each countenance is known, and others, like me, who only experience it a few times a month.

{Understanding