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Throughout my mid-20s, I observed my grandmother through the pane of a café. I felt astonished – she had passed away the prior year. I gazed for a short time, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced similar situations throughout my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" someone I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could promptly determine who the unknown individual resembled – like my grandmother. In other instances, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Range of Face Identification Abilities

Recently, I became curious if others have these odd experiences. When I asked my companions, one said she regularly sees persons in unexpected places who look familiar. Others at times confuse a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some described completely different responses – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Range of Facial Recognition Skills

Scientists have developed many tests to measure the capacity to recall faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to identify kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the ability to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain functions; for example, there is proof that super-recognizers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would offer understanding on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that experts say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, then find it in lineups. During another test that instructed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after assessment of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping False Alarm Rates

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a series of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also astonished. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but infrequently mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Plausible Reasons

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to learn and store faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus 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 stranger who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted 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 continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" strangers. Examining further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of documented instances all occurred after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected HFF in many years 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 few times a month.

{Understanding