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In my twenties, I noticed my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the year before. I gazed for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had comparable occurrences during my life. Periodically, I "recognized" someone I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could rapidly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person looked like – like my elderly relative. On other occasions, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Investigating the Range of Face Identification Experiences

In recent times, I started wondering if other people have these unusual encounters. When I asked my acquaintances, one mentioned she frequently sees people in random places who look familiar. Others occasionally mistake a stranger or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Spectrum of Face Identification Skills

Researchers have developed many assessments to measure the capacity to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to know kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for instance, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Tests

I felt curious whether these tests would shed some light on why strangers look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that researchers say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I received several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. 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 quite place them – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after evaluation of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending False Alarm Rates

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a series of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also surprised. I recognized many of the old faces, but rarely mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics 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?

Exploring Possible Explanations

It was theorized that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to learn and commit faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

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 false alarm moments, thinking they identify 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 facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I sat on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all happened after a health incident such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, 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 dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of investigation.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think every face is known, and others, like me, who only experience it a few times a month.

{Understanding