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In my young adulthood, I noticed my grandma through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had died the year before. I gazed for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd had analogous experiences all through my life. Periodically, I "knew" someone I didn't know. At times I could promptly determine who the stranger resembled – like my grandmother. In other instances, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Variety of Face Identification Abilities

Lately, I became curious if other people have these peculiar encounters. When I asked my companions, one mentioned she often sees people in random places who look known. Others at times misidentify a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported no such experiences – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

Scientists have developed many assessments to assess the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to know family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain functions; for instance, there is indication that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt intrigued whether these tests would shed some light on why strangers look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that scientists say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, then find it in lineups. 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 everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after assessment of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also astonished. I recognized many of the old faces, but infrequently mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Potential Reasons

It was suggested that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to learn and store faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These tests 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" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of reported cases all took place after a physical event such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful 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 known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding