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Throughout my young adulthood, I noticed my grandmother through the pane of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had passed away the previous year. I stared for a short time, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced analogous occurrences all through my life. Periodically, I "knew" a person I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could promptly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my grandma. On other occasions, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I became curious if other people have these unusual encounters. When I asked my friends, one commented she regularly sees persons in random places who look recognizable. Others at times mistake a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some reported completely different responses – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Person Recognition Abilities

Scientists have designed many assessments to measure the capacity to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to know family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain processes; for instance, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a sentiment that scientists say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, 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 recognizable, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my outcome. But after analysis of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding 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 participant looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the first set. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Plausible Causes

It was suggested that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and retain faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person 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 "identify" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of documented instances all took place after a health incident such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of study.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think each countenance is recognizable, and others, like me, who only experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding