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During my twenties, I spotted my grandma through the pane of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had passed away the prior year. I stared for a short time, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had analogous situations all through my life. Periodically, I "knew" someone I had never met. At times I could rapidly determine who the stranger reminded me of – for instance my elderly relative. Other times, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Variety of Person Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I started wondering if different individuals have these peculiar encounters. When I questioned my acquaintances, one mentioned she regularly sees people in unexpected places who look familiar. Others sometimes misidentify a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Scientists have designed many evaluations to quantify the capacity to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to recognize family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how proficient someone is at determining 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 examined the ability to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for case, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a emotion that experts say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in lineups. During another test that directed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after evaluation of my performance, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also astonished. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but rarely confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this indicator, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, 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 elderly relative's?

Examining Possible Reasons

It was theorized that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and commit faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative 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 mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all occurred after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing 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 challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in long durations of investigation.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think every face is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding