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In my young adulthood, I spotted my grandma through the pane of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had died the year before. I gazed for a short time, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered similar situations all through my life. From time to time, I "recognized" a person I didn't know. Occasionally I could promptly determine who the unknown individual looked like – such as my elderly relative. On other occasions, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Examining the Variety of Person Recognition Abilities

Lately, I started wondering if other people have these odd encounters. When I questioned my acquaintances, one mentioned she often sees individuals in random places who look known. Others occasionally misidentify a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some described completely different responses – they could effortlessly recognize 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 cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Person Recognition Skills

Scientists have created many tests to quantify the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to identify family, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain functions; for example, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these tests would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that researchers say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that directed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after evaluation of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a series of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also surprised. I remembered many of the old faces, but seldom confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Possible Causes

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to learn and store faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all happened after a physical event such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

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 methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with possible HFF in long durations of research.

"The occurrence rate 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 known, and others, like me, who only encounter it a few times a month.

{Understanding