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During my young adulthood, I observed my grandmother through the glass of a café. I felt stunned – she had died the prior year. I stared for a short time, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced comparable situations all through my life. Periodically, I "knew" someone I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could rapidly identify who the stranger reminded me of – such as my grandma. Other times, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Spectrum of Person Recognition Experiences

Lately, I began questioning if other people have these peculiar experiences. When I questioned my acquaintances, one mentioned she frequently sees persons in random places who look recognizable. Others occasionally mistake a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research 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 perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Face Identification Capacities

Researchers have developed many evaluations to measure the skill to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to identify family, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the ability to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain functions; for example, there is indication that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Evaluations

I felt interested whether these tests would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a sentiment that experts say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

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 black-and-white photos of a face from three angles, then find it in lineups. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after assessment of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping False Alarm Rates

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they review a series of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also surprised. I remembered many of the old faces, but infrequently misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Examining Plausible Causes

It was proposed that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and likely near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and store faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus 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 prone to notice the unknown person who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Over-familiarity 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" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all took place after a physical event such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected HFF in long durations of study.

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

{Understanding