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During my young adulthood, I spotted my grandma through the window of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the previous year. I stared for a short time, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced comparable situations during my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" someone I didn't know. At times I could quickly determine who the unknown individual reminded me of – like my elderly relative. In other instances, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I began questioning if different individuals have these odd encounters. When I asked my friends, one commented she frequently sees individuals in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others at times misidentify a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes 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 Range of Face Identification Capacities

Investigators have developed many evaluations to quantify the ability to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to identify kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain processes; for example, there is evidence that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Tests

I felt curious whether these assessments would offer understanding on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that researchers say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from three angles, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after analysis of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, 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 performance on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Potential Causes

It was suggested that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to learn and retain faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat 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 condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of reported cases all happened after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy 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 face identification challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with potential HFF in long durations of study.

"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 known, and others, like me, who only experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding