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In my twenties, I spotted my grandmother through the window of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the year before. I gazed for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered similar situations during my life. From time to time, I "knew" someone I didn't know. Sometimes I could promptly identify who the stranger reminded me of – for instance my grandmother. On other occasions, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Variety of Face Identification Capabilities

Lately, I started wondering if other people have these peculiar experiences. When I asked my companions, one mentioned she regularly sees persons in random places who look recognizable. Others sometimes mistake a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some described nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of perceptions. 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 beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Skills

Scientists have created many assessments to quantify the ability to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to recognize family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how proficient someone is at recognizing 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 ability to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain processes; for case, there is evidence that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that experts say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from multiple perspectives, 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 known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

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

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a series of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also astonished. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Examining Possible Causes

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and retain faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention 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 prone to notice the stranger who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Examining further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of documented instances all took place after a health incident such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing 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 difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible HFF in many years of investigation.

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

{Understanding