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During my twenties, I noticed my grandmother through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had departed the prior year. I stared for a short time, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd had comparable situations throughout my life. Periodically, I "identified" an individual I didn't know. Sometimes I could promptly determine who the unknown individual looked like – for instance my grandmother. Other times, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Examining the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I began questioning if different individuals have these odd encounters. When I asked my companions, one commented she regularly sees people in random places who look familiar. Others at times confuse a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some reported completely different responses – they could readily identify 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 grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour 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 interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Person Recognition Skills

Investigators have developed many tests to assess the skill to recall faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how proficient someone is at telling 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 looked at the skill to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain functions; for case, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these tests would provide insight on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that researchers say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I received several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling confused 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 arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after analysis of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping False Alarm Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a string of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 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 content with my result, but also surprised. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Examining Plausible Reasons

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and likely near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and store faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", 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 prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion 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 "know" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all took place after a physical event such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think each countenance is familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding