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During my young adulthood, I spotted my grandma through the glass of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had died the year before. I gazed for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered similar experiences during my life. From time to time, I "knew" someone I had never met. Occasionally I could rapidly pinpoint who the unknown individual resembled – such as my grandmother. In other instances, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Examining the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

Recently, I started wondering if others have these odd encounters. When I inquired my companions, one said she regularly sees individuals in random places who look known. Others sometimes confuse a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some reported no such experiences – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma 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 beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Face Identification Abilities

Scientists have designed many evaluations to measure the skill to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to know relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how good someone is at telling 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 recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain functions; for example, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Tests

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that experts say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after assessment of my performance, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a string of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but infrequently mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Possible Explanations

It was theorized that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, assign traits to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and store faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of documented instances all happened after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or stroke, 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 sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of study.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think each countenance is familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a few times a month.

{Understanding