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During my young adulthood, I observed my grandmother through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the prior year. I stared for a short time, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had analogous situations throughout my life. From time to time, I "knew" an individual I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could rapidly identify who the unfamiliar person resembled – like my grandmother. Other times, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Examining the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I began questioning if others have these peculiar encounters. When I questioned my companions, one said she regularly sees persons 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 easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour 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 experience the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Face Identification Abilities

Investigators have designed many assessments to assess the ability to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to identify relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain processes; for case, there is proof that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Tests

I felt curious whether these tests would shed some light on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a sentiment that scientists say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that instructed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

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

Grasping False Alarm Percentages

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a string of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the first set. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but rarely mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Possible Explanations

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and commit faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", 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 looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" strangers. Examining further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of documented instances all occurred after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with suspected HFF in many years of study.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a range, with some people who think every face is known, and others, like me, who only experience it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding