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Throughout my twenties, I noticed my grandma through the window of a café. I felt stunned – she had died the prior year. I looked intently for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had analogous occurrences all through my life. Periodically, I "recognized" someone I was unacquainted with. At times I could rapidly pinpoint who the unknown individual looked like – like my elderly relative. Other times, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Examining the Range of Face Identification Abilities

Recently, I started wondering if different individuals have these unusual experiences. When I asked my companions, one commented she frequently sees persons in random places who look familiar. Others at times misidentify a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some described completely different responses – they could effortlessly identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research 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 interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Facial Recognition Capacities

Investigators have created many tests to measure the skill to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to identify family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the ability to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain mechanisms; for instance, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Evaluations

I felt interested whether these assessments would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that scientists say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I received several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that directed 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 – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after assessment of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding False Alarm Rates

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a string of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also astonished. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but infrequently mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Potential Explanations

It was proposed that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Research suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and commit faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who resembles my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining 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. Examining further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of reported cases all happened after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, 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 liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

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

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

{Understanding