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In my mid-20s, I observed my grandmother through the glass of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had died the previous year. I looked intently for a short time, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd had analogous experiences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" someone I had never met. At times I could rapidly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person resembled – like my elderly relative. Other times, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Variety of Face Identification Experiences

Lately, I became curious if other people have these odd situations. When I inquired my friends, one mentioned she often sees individuals in unpredictable places who look known. Others occasionally misidentify a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. 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 grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Person Recognition Skills

Researchers have developed many tests to measure the ability to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to know kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain functions; for case, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt intrigued whether these tests would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that researchers say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, then find it in lineups. During another test that instructed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after assessment of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they review 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 cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also astonished. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Possible Explanations

It was suggested that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to develop and commit faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations 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 syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of documented instances all took place after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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

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

{Understanding