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In my mid-20s, I noticed my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the previous year. I looked intently for a moment, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced comparable occurrences during my life. From time to time, I "recognized" an individual I had never met. Sometimes I could rapidly identify who the unknown individual looked like – such as my grandma. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Investigating the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I became curious if different individuals have these odd situations. When I inquired my friends, one mentioned she regularly sees people in unexpected places who look familiar. Others occasionally misidentify a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research 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 experience the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Facial Recognition Skills

Scientists have developed many tests to quantify the skill to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to know kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the capacity to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain mechanisms; 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 remember old faces.

Taking Face Identification Assessments

I felt curious whether these assessments would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that experts say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after analysis of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also surprised. I recognized many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Possible Causes

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, assign traits to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and retain faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", 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 disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of reported cases all happened after a medical episode such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing 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 visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

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

"The frequency 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 experience it a few times a month.

{Understanding