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In my mid-20s, I spotted my grandma through the glass of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the prior year. I looked intently for a brief period, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd had analogous experiences during my life. From time to time, I "identified" a person I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could quickly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person looked like – like my grandmother. In other instances, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Exploring the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capabilities

In recent times, I began questioning if other people have these peculiar experiences. When I inquired my companions, one said she frequently sees individuals in unexpected places who look known. Others at times misidentify a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Range of Facial Recognition Skills

Scientists have designed many tests to quantify the skill to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to know family, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the skill to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain functions; for case, there is evidence that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that experts say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in arrays. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after assessment of my performance, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding False Alarm Frequencies

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 subject looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a string of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, 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%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Potential Explanations

It was theorized that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, assign traits to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Research suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and commit faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

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 recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of reported cases all happened after a health incident such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing 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 person recognition 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 potential HFF in long durations of investigation.

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

{Understanding