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In my twenties, I observed my grandmother through the window of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had departed the previous year. I looked intently for a brief period, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced similar experiences all through my life. Periodically, I "identified" a person I had never met. Occasionally I could rapidly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my grandmother. In other instances, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Examining the Variety of Facial Recognition Capabilities

In recent times, I began questioning if others have these odd experiences. When I inquired my acquaintances, one said she regularly sees individuals in random places who look familiar. Others at times misidentify a stranger or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Comprehending the Range of Face Identification Capacities

Scientists have developed many evaluations to assess the ability to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the ability to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain functions; for instance, there is indication that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these evaluations would shed some light on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that experts say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after analysis of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding False Alarm Rates

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a string of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 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 result, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but rarely misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Potential Reasons

It was proposed that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to learn and commit faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These tests 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" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all occurred after a health incident such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments 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 study.

"The prevalence 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 recognizable, and others, like me, who only encounter it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding