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During my twenties, I observed my grandmother through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the prior year. I gazed for a moment, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced analogous occurrences during my life. Periodically, I "knew" someone I had never met. Sometimes I could quickly pinpoint who the unknown individual reminded me of – like my grandmother. In other instances, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Spectrum of Person Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I became curious if different individuals have these peculiar experiences. When I asked my friends, one commented she regularly sees people in unpredictable places who look known. Others occasionally mistake a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds 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 experience the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Face Identification Skills

Researchers have designed many tests to assess the skill to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to know family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the ability to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain processes; for case, there is indication that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Face Identification Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that experts say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, 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 exactly identify them – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after evaluation of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a sequence of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the first set. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but rarely misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, 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 misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Potential Explanations

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, assign traits to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to learn and store faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition 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 "identify" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of documented instances all happened after a health incident such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible HFF in many years of investigation.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a range, with some people who think all visages is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding