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Throughout my young adulthood, I observed my grandmother through the pane of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the prior year. I stared for a moment, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered analogous situations all through my life. Periodically, I "recognized" a person I had never met. Sometimes I could quickly identify who the unknown individual resembled – for instance my grandma. In other instances, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Exploring the Range of Face Identification Capabilities

In recent times, I became curious if others have these odd experiences. When I asked my friends, one said she frequently sees individuals in unexpected places who look known. Others occasionally misidentify a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some described no such experiences – 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 grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Skills

Researchers have created many assessments to assess the capacity to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for instance, there is indication that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Tests

I felt curious whether these tests would provide insight on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that experts say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in arrays. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my outcome. But after analysis of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they review a series of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also astonished. I recalled many of the old faces, but infrequently confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Examining Possible Explanations

It was suggested that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and commit faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", 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 attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all happened after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. 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 small number of people with suspected HFF in long durations of research.

"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 each countenance is familiar, and others, like me, who only undergo it a few times a month.

{Understanding