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During my mid-20s, I noticed my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had died the year before. I looked intently for a brief period, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered comparable situations all through my life. Occasionally, I "identified" someone I had never met. Sometimes I could quickly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person looked like – such as my elderly relative. Other times, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Examining the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I began questioning if other people have these unusual situations. When I questioned my friends, one mentioned she frequently sees individuals in unexpected places who look familiar. Others at times confuse a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Researchers have created many evaluations to measure the capacity to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to know relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the skill to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain mechanisms; for example, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that researchers say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from three angles, then find it in lineups. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after analysis of my results, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding Incorrect Identification Rates

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the first set. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Possible Explanations

It was proposed that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, assign traits to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to develop and store faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of reported cases all occurred after a physical event such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity 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 person recognition difficulties, including perceptual alterations, 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 extended periods of research.

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

{Understanding