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Throughout my young adulthood, I noticed my grandma through the glass of a café. I felt stunned – she had departed the previous year. I gazed for a moment, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd had comparable experiences during my life. Occasionally, I "knew" an individual I had never met. At times I could quickly identify who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my grandmother. Other times, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

Recently, I became curious if different individuals have these unusual encounters. When I asked my friends, one mentioned she often sees people in unpredictable places who look known. Others at times confuse a stranger or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capacities

Scientists have developed many evaluations to quantify the skill to remember faces. There exists a wide range: 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 prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to identify family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how good 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 looked at the ability to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use different brain processes; for example, there is indication that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Face Identification Tests

I felt curious whether these assessments would provide insight on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a sentiment that experts say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I received several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, then find it in lineups. During another test that directed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't quite place them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after evaluation of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending False Alarm Percentages

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a series of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also astonished. I recalled many of the old faces, but rarely confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Potential Causes

It was proposed that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and retain faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger 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.

Researching Over-familiarity 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 condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all happened after a physical event such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with potential HFF in extended periods of study.

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

{Understanding