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Throughout my twenties, I observed my grandmother through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the prior year. I looked intently for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered similar situations all through my life. From time to time, I "identified" someone I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could quickly pinpoint who the unknown individual resembled – like my elderly relative. In other instances, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Lately, I began questioning if other people have these peculiar situations. When I inquired my friends, one mentioned she regularly sees persons in random places who look recognizable. Others occasionally confuse a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described no such experiences – they could effortlessly identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my elderly relative 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 make mistakes sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

Scientists have created many tests to quantify the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the skill to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain processes; for example, there is proof that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that scientists say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I received several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my real-life experience.

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

Comprehending False Alarm Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a series of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the old faces, but infrequently confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Potential Reasons

It was theorized that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and commit faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", 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 closely at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" strangers. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all occurred after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of research.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a range, with some people who think each countenance is recognizable, and others, like me, who only undergo it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding