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In my twenties, I spotted my elderly relative through the glass of a café. I felt stunned – she had passed away the prior year. I looked intently for a moment, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered analogous occurrences throughout my life. From time to time, I "recognized" a person I didn't know. At times I could promptly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person looked like – like my elderly relative. On other occasions, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Exploring the Range of Person Recognition Experiences

Recently, I became curious if other people have these odd situations. When I asked my acquaintances, one mentioned she frequently sees individuals in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others sometimes misidentify a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could effortlessly identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? 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 experience the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Facial Recognition Skills

Researchers have designed many assessments to assess the skill to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to recognize family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the ability to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain functions; for case, there is indication that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt curious whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that scientists say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white 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 exactly identify them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after assessment of my performance, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding Mistaken Recognition 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 series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a series of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also astonished. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but infrequently misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Possible Reasons

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to develop and retain faces to permanent recall. 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 "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition 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 "identify" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of documented instances all occurred after a medical episode such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible HFF in extended periods of investigation.

"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 recognizable, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding