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During my young adulthood, I observed my grandmother through the window of a café. I felt astonished – she had died the previous year. I looked intently for a short time, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd had comparable situations all through my life. Occasionally, I "identified" a person I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could quickly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – like my grandma. In other instances, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Range of Facial Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I began questioning if different individuals have these unusual experiences. When I inquired my friends, one said she frequently sees people in random places who look familiar. Others sometimes mistake a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative 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 commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Person Recognition Skills

Researchers have created many tests to quantify the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to identify family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the skill to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain processes; for case, there is proof that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Face Identification Tests

I felt curious whether these tests would offer understanding on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that researchers say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, 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 familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after analysis of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping False Alarm Frequencies

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a series of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Possible Causes

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and store faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was thought 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 recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. 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 over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of reported cases all happened after a medical episode such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with possible HFF in long durations of study.

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

{Understanding