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During my young adulthood, I spotted my grandmother through the window of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the prior year. I gazed for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd had analogous situations all through my life. Periodically, I "recognized" a person I didn't know. At times I could quickly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my grandma. In other instances, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Range of Facial Recognition Capabilities

In recent times, I began questioning if different individuals have these peculiar experiences. When I asked my companions, one said she regularly sees persons in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others occasionally confuse a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Range of Face Identification Capacities

Investigators have created many assessments to assess the skill to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one end 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 have difficulty to recognize family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the skill to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain mechanisms; for case, there is indication that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt curious whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that experts say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, 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 recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after assessment of my results, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also surprised. 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%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Potential Explanations

It was proposed that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to develop and retain faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who resembles my elderly relative. 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 tests helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" strangers. Researching further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of documented instances all happened after a physical event such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. 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 handful of people with potential HFF in long durations of research.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think all visages is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a few times a month.

{Understanding