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During my young adulthood, I noticed my elderly relative through the window of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the year before. I stared for a moment, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced similar situations during my life. Occasionally, I "identified" a person I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could promptly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – for instance my elderly relative. In other instances, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Examining the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

Recently, I started wondering if others have these unusual experiences. When I questioned my companions, one said she frequently sees people in random places who look familiar. Others at times mistake 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 fascinated by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Spectrum of Face Identification Capacities

Scientists have designed many tests to assess the ability to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to identify family, intimate companions 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 think I am deficient. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the skill to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use different brain processes; for instance, there is indication that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Tests

I felt intrigued whether these tests would shed some light on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that scientists say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities 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 less than confident about my performance. But after assessment of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the old faces, but infrequently confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Examining Possible Explanations

It was suggested that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to develop and commit faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", 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 closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I stood on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all occurred after a health incident such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. 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 extended periods 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 every face is familiar, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding