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Throughout my twenties, I spotted my grandma through the pane of a café. I felt astonished – she had passed away the prior year. I stared for a moment, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced analogous situations throughout my life. Periodically, I "identified" an individual I was unacquainted with. At times I could promptly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my elderly relative. In other instances, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Examining the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I started wondering if other people have these unusual situations. When I asked my companions, one mentioned she often sees people in unexpected places who look familiar. Others occasionally confuse a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation 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 Continuum of Face Identification Skills

Researchers have created many assessments to assess the capacity to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to know kin, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the ability to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain functions; for example, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would offer understanding on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that experts say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I received several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused 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 groups. During another test that told me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my real-life experience.

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

Comprehending False Alarm Rates

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the first set. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also surprised. I remembered many of the old faces, but rarely mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Examining Plausible Causes

It was theorized that I probably possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and commit faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, 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 recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of reported cases all occurred after a health incident such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in long durations of investigation.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a range, with some people who think all visages is familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding