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In my young adulthood, I observed my grandma through the pane of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had passed away the year before. I looked intently for a brief period, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd had analogous situations all through my life. Periodically, I "recognized" an individual I was unacquainted with. At times I could promptly pinpoint who the stranger resembled – for instance my grandmother. Other times, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Examining the Variety of Person Recognition Capabilities

In recent times, I became curious if different individuals have these peculiar encounters. When I inquired my acquaintances, one said she regularly sees people in random places who look familiar. Others sometimes mistake a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capacities

Investigators have developed many evaluations to measure the ability to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to identify kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the ability to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain processes; for case, there is evidence that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that experts say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after analysis of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a string of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

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

Exploring Potential Explanations

It was proposed that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to develop and commit faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all happened after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected HFF in many years of study.

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

{Understanding