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Throughout my young adulthood, I noticed my grandma through the glass of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had passed away the year before. I gazed for a moment, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered analogous situations throughout my life. From time to time, I "recognized" a person I didn't know. At times I could rapidly pinpoint who the stranger resembled – like my elderly relative. In other instances, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Range of Face Identification Abilities

Recently, I began questioning if different individuals have these odd encounters. When I questioned my friends, one commented she often sees persons in unexpected places who look known. Others occasionally confuse a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour 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.

Comprehending the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

Researchers have created many evaluations to assess the skill to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to recognize relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the ability to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain functions; for case, there is evidence that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these evaluations would shed some light on why strangers look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a sentiment that researchers say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in lineups. During another test that instructed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after analysis of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping False Alarm Frequencies

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a string of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also surprised. I recalled many of the old faces, but infrequently confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Examining Plausible Reasons

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to learn and retain faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who looks like my elderly relative. 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 sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of reported cases all took place after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in many years of study.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated 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