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In my twenties, I observed my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had passed away the year before. I stared for a short time, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced analogous experiences throughout my life. From time to time, I "recognized" someone I had never met. Sometimes I could promptly identify who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my grandmother. In other instances, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capabilities

In recent times, I started wondering if others have these odd situations. When I asked my friends, one mentioned she regularly sees individuals in unpredictable places who look known. Others sometimes mistake a stranger or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some described nothing of the kind – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

Investigators have designed many evaluations to quantify the capacity to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to identify family, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the skill to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use different brain mechanisms; for case, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these assessments would provide insight on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that experts say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after evaluation of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also astonished. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but seldom misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Plausible Explanations

It was proposed that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to learn and retain faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of documented instances all took place after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. 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 small number of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of study.

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

{Understanding