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In my twenties, I spotted my grandmother through the window of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the previous year. I gazed for a short time, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd had comparable experiences during my life. Occasionally, I "knew" an individual I was unacquainted with. At times I could promptly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my grandmother. On other occasions, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Variety of Face Identification Experiences

In recent times, I started wondering if different individuals have these peculiar situations. When I questioned my companions, one said she frequently sees individuals in random places who look familiar. Others occasionally misidentify a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some described no such experiences – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies 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 interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capacities

Scientists have designed many evaluations to measure the capacity 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 face blindness, who often find it challenging to know relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recall a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain processes; for case, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Face Identification Assessments

I felt curious whether these tests would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a emotion that experts say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I received several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that told 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 – similar to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after evaluation of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they review a string of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also astonished. I remembered many of the old faces, but rarely confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Potential Causes

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and retain faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, 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 identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating 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 "identify" strangers. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of reported cases all took place after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with suspected HFF in long durations of research.

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

{Understanding