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In my twenties, I noticed my grandmother through the glass of a café. I felt astonished – she had departed the prior year. I gazed for a short time, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered similar situations during my life. From time to time, I "identified" a person I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could rapidly identify who the stranger looked like – like my elderly relative. In other instances, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Examining the Spectrum of Face Identification Experiences

Lately, I started wondering if others have these unusual situations. When I asked my friends, one commented she often sees persons in unexpected places who look known. Others sometimes misidentify a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes 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 Skills

Researchers have created many assessments to assess the skill to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to identify relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain functions; for case, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers 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 Assessments

I felt curious whether these tests would offer understanding on why strangers look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that scientists say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several person recognition tests. I completed 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 lineups. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after analysis of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the first set. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also astonished. I recalled many of the old faces, but infrequently misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Plausible Explanations

It was theorized that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and commit faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Over-familiarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of documented instances all happened after a physical event such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential 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 known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a few times a month.

{Understanding