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During my mid-20s, I noticed my grandmother through the glass of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the prior year. I stared for a moment, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered similar experiences all through my life. Periodically, I "knew" a person I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could rapidly identify who the unknown individual looked like – for instance my elderly relative. On other occasions, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Variety of Facial Recognition Abilities

Recently, I started wondering if different individuals have these peculiar experiences. When I asked my friends, one said she regularly sees individuals in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others occasionally confuse a stranger or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds 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 experience the same thing.

Comprehending the Range of Face Identification Abilities

Scientists have designed many evaluations to assess the capacity to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to know relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the skill to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use different brain functions; for example, there is evidence that super-recognizers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often remember people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that experts say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in lineups. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my actual experience.

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

Grasping Incorrect Identification 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 sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – 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 range, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Potential Explanations

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and retain faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", 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 attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of reported cases all happened after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition difficulties, including visual distortions, 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 few of people with suspected HFF in long durations of study.

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

{Understanding