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In my mid-20s, I spotted my elderly relative through the window of a café. I felt astonished – she had died the prior year. I stared for a short time, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd had analogous occurrences all through my life. Occasionally, I "knew" an individual I had never met. At times I could promptly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my elderly relative. In other instances, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Variety of Face Identification Capabilities

Lately, I started wondering if different individuals have these odd encounters. When I asked my friends, one mentioned she regularly sees persons in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others sometimes misidentify a stranger or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research 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.

Grasping the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Skills

Scientists have designed many tests to assess the capacity to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to recognize kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain mechanisms; for example, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Tests

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would offer understanding on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment 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 received several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused 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 arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after analysis of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 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 pleased with my result, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the old faces, but rarely mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Possible Causes

It was theorized that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to learn and store faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who resembles my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of documented instances all took place after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing 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 perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible HFF in long durations of investigation.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think each countenance is familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding