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In my young adulthood, I spotted my elderly relative through the window of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had died the prior year. I looked intently for a moment, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered similar occurrences during my life. Occasionally, I "knew" a person I had never met. At times I could quickly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – for instance my grandmother. On other occasions, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Variety of Facial Recognition Experiences

Lately, I started wondering if other people have these odd experiences. When I inquired my friends, one commented she regularly sees individuals in random places who look familiar. Others sometimes mistake a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some reported completely different responses – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Investigators have created many assessments to assess the skill to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to know family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But researchers "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to recall a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain processes; for case, there is evidence that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these assessments would offer understanding on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a sentiment that scientists say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in arrays. 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 quite place them – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after evaluation of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding False Alarm Frequencies

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a series of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also surprised. I recognized many of the old faces, but rarely 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, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Possible Causes

It was suggested that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and store faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention 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 inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I sat on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" strangers. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of documented instances all happened after a physical event such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected HFF in many years of research.

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

{Understanding