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In my twenties, I observed my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had passed away the year before. I looked intently for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd had analogous occurrences all through my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" an individual I didn't know. Occasionally I could promptly pinpoint who the stranger resembled – like my grandmother. On other occasions, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I started wondering if others have these peculiar experiences. When I questioned my acquaintances, one mentioned she often sees people in random places who look known. Others sometimes mistake a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of experiences. Was it just desire 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 have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Comprehending the Range of Face Identification Abilities

Scientists have developed many evaluations to assess the skill to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to identify relatives, close friends 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 suspect I am deficient. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain mechanisms; for example, there is evidence that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these assessments would provide insight on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a feeling that scientists say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale 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 quite place them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after evaluation of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Rates

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a string of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also astonished. I recognized many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Potential Reasons

It was proposed that I likely possessed some super-recognizer abilities. 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 high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to learn and commit faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a analogous presence.

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 incorrect identification 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 elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition 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" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of reported cases all happened after a medical episode such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. 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 small number of people with potential HFF in extended periods of study.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think all visages is familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding