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Throughout my twenties, I observed my grandma through the window of a café. I felt stunned – she had departed the prior year. I gazed for a moment, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd had analogous occurrences throughout my life. Periodically, I "recognized" a person I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could quickly identify who the unknown individual resembled – for instance my elderly relative. In other instances, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Examining the Variety of Person Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I became curious if different individuals have these peculiar encounters. When I inquired my friends, one mentioned she often sees people in random places who look recognizable. Others at times confuse a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some reported completely different responses – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? 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 experience the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Researchers have developed many evaluations to measure the capacity to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to know relatives, close friends 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 suspect I am deficient. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the skill to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use different brain processes; for example, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Tests

I felt interested whether these tests would offer understanding on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that experts say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, then find it in arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident 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 "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Rates

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances 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 different face. Then they look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also astonished. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this indicator, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Potential Causes

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to learn and commit faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of documented instances all took place after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of study.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think every face is familiar, and others, like me, who only undergo it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding