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Throughout my mid-20s, I noticed my grandmother through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the previous year. I looked intently for a brief period, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered analogous situations all through my life. From time to time, I "identified" an individual I didn't know. At times I could rapidly determine who the unknown individual reminded me of – such as my grandma. In other instances, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Examining the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Experiences

Recently, I began questioning if others have these peculiar situations. When I inquired my companions, one commented she frequently sees individuals in random places who look familiar. Others occasionally mistake a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some described 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 desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research 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 interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Person Recognition Skills

Investigators have designed many evaluations to measure the ability to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to know kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain mechanisms; for instance, there is evidence that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Face Identification Evaluations

I felt interested whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that scientists say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that directed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my outcome. But after analysis of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they review a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but infrequently mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a stranger's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Possible Explanations

It was theorized that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and commit faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of reported cases all happened after a physical event such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with potential HFF in many years 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 experience it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding