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Throughout my mid-20s, I observed my grandma through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the prior year. I stared for a brief period, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered similar experiences all through my life. From time to time, I "recognized" a person I had never met. At times I could rapidly determine who the stranger reminded me of – such as my grandmother. In other instances, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Investigating the Spectrum of Person Recognition Experiences

Lately, I became curious if other people have these unusual situations. When I asked my friends, one commented she regularly sees individuals in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others sometimes misidentify a stranger or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Skills

Investigators have created many assessments to assess the skill to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to identify family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the capacity to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use different brain mechanisms; for example, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Tests

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

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after analysis of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending False Alarm Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they review a series of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the first set. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also astonished. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Examining Plausible Explanations

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to learn and store faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know 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 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.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all took place after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing 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 challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with possible HFF in many years of research.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think all visages is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding