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During my twenties, I spotted my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had passed away the year before. I gazed for a moment, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered comparable situations all through my life. From time to time, I "recognized" a person I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could promptly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my grandmother. Other times, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capabilities

In recent times, I started wondering if different individuals have these peculiar encounters. When I inquired my companions, one mentioned she frequently sees individuals in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others occasionally mistake a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capacities

Researchers have designed many assessments to quantify the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to recognize kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the skill to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain processes; for example, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Face Identification Evaluations

I felt interested whether these tests would provide insight on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that researchers say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, 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 known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after analysis of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 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 content with my result, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but rarely misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Potential Causes

It was suggested that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and retain faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments 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" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all happened after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with potential HFF in long durations of investigation.

"The frequency 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 known, and others, like me, who only experience it a few times a month.

{Understanding