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In my young adulthood, I observed my grandmother through the pane of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the year before. I looked intently for a moment, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced comparable situations during my life. Occasionally, I "identified" an individual I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could promptly identify who the stranger looked like – like my grandmother. On other occasions, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Variety of Face Identification Experiences

In recent times, I began questioning if other people have these unusual encounters. When I questioned my friends, one commented she often sees persons in random places who look recognizable. Others occasionally mistake a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some reported no such experiences – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother 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 have inaccuracies sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Skills

Investigators have developed many tests to quantify the ability to recall faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to identify family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. But researchers "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the ability to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain functions; for instance, there is proof that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these assessments would shed some light on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that scientists say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling confused 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 public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. 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".

Grasping False Alarm Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the first set. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also astonished. I recognized many of the old faces, but infrequently misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Possible Reasons

It was suggested that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to develop and commit faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification 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 resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching 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" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of reported cases all took place after a medical episode such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of face identification challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. 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 many years of research.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think all visages is known, and others, like me, who only experience it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding