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During my mid-20s, I noticed my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had died the prior year. I stared for a moment, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd had similar experiences during my life. Periodically, I "recognized" someone I had never met. At times I could rapidly determine who the unknown individual looked like – such as my elderly relative. Other times, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Examining the Range of Face Identification Abilities

Recently, I began questioning if others have these unusual encounters. When I inquired my acquaintances, one commented she frequently sees persons in unpredictable places who look known. Others sometimes misidentify a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some described no such experiences – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother 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 err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Range of Face Identification Skills

Scientists have developed many evaluations to assess the capacity to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to recognize relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain functions; for case, there is proof that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that researchers say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale 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 recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after evaluation of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping False Alarm Percentages

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a string of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and indicate 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 facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also astonished. I recognized many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Potential Causes

It was proposed that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and commit faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they know 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 face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of reported cases all happened after a medical episode such as a seizure or cerebral accident, 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 face identification difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think all visages is recognizable, and others, like me, who only encounter it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding