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During my young adulthood, I spotted my grandma through the pane of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had departed the year before. I gazed for a brief period, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd had analogous experiences throughout my life. Periodically, I "recognized" a person I had never met. At times I could quickly identify who the unknown individual resembled – for instance my elderly relative. Other times, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Examining the Variety of Person Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I started wondering if other people have these peculiar encounters. When I questioned my companions, one commented she regularly sees individuals in random places who look familiar. Others occasionally mistake a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies 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 Capacities

Scientists have created many tests to quantify the capacity to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to know family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how skilled someone is at telling 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 recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain mechanisms; for example, there is evidence that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Face Identification Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these tests would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that experts say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, then find it in arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after assessment of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Rates

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they review a string of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but infrequently mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Potential Reasons

It was suggested that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Research suggests that the later element helps people to develop and store faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations 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" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of documented instances all took place after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

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

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a range, with some people who think each countenance is recognizable, and others, like me, who only encounter it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding