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Throughout my twenties, I observed my grandma through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had passed away the year before. I stared for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced similar occurrences all through my life. Periodically, I "identified" a person I had never met. Sometimes I could promptly identify who the stranger looked like – like my grandmother. Other times, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Variety of Person Recognition Abilities

Recently, I became curious if different individuals have these peculiar experiences. When I asked my friends, one commented she regularly sees persons in random places who look recognizable. Others at times mistake a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some reported completely different responses – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Facial Recognition Skills

Researchers have developed many tests to assess the ability to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to recognize kin, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the capacity to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain processes; for case, there is proof that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why strangers look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that experts say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped 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 lineups. During another test that told 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 – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after assessment of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – 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 end of the continuum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also astonished. I recognized many of the old faces, but infrequently misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Plausible Reasons

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter 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 elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person 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.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of reported cases all happened after a physical event such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of study.

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

{Understanding