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Throughout my young adulthood, I spotted my grandmother through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the prior year. I looked intently for a short time, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd had similar experiences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "knew" an individual I didn't know. Occasionally I could quickly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – for instance my grandma. In other instances, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Examining the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

Lately, I became curious if different individuals have these odd encounters. When I asked my companions, one mentioned she regularly sees persons in unpredictable places who look known. Others at times mistake a stranger or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some described nothing of the kind – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour 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.

Understanding the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capacities

Researchers have developed many tests to measure the capacity to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain functions; for example, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt curious whether these tests would offer understanding on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that experts say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after evaluation of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Rates

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a series of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the old faces, but rarely misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers 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 grandmother's?

Examining Plausible Causes

It was suggested that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and store faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I positioned on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all occurred after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible HFF in long durations of investigation.

"The frequency 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 known, and others, like me, who only experience it a few times a month.

{Understanding