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During my twenties, I noticed my elderly relative through the window of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had died the previous year. I looked intently for a moment, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered analogous occurrences throughout my life. Periodically, I "knew" an individual I didn't know. Occasionally I could rapidly identify who the unknown individual looked like – such as my elderly relative. In other instances, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

Recently, I began questioning if other people have these odd encounters. When I questioned my companions, one mentioned she regularly sees persons in random places who look known. Others sometimes misidentify a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could readily 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 elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

Researchers have designed many evaluations to assess the capacity to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are superior face rememberers, 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 struggle to recognize relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the ability to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain processes; for example, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these assessments would provide insight on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that scientists say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I received 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 monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that directed 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 real-life experience.

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

Comprehending False Alarm Percentages

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a series of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also surprised. I recalled many of the old faces, but infrequently mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Possible Reasons

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and retain faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of reported cases all occurred after a medical episode such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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

"The occurrence rate 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 encounter it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding