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In my twenties, I noticed my grandma through the window of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the prior year. I looked intently for a short time, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced comparable occurrences during my life. From time to time, I "knew" someone I had never met. Sometimes I could rapidly pinpoint who the unknown individual looked like – for instance my elderly relative. In other instances, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Range of Face Identification Abilities

Recently, I began questioning if other people have these peculiar situations. When I asked my companions, one said she regularly sees people in random places who look known. Others sometimes mistake a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported completely different responses – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of experiences. Was it just longing 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 perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Person Recognition Skills

Scientists have developed many tests to quantify the ability to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize family, close friends 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 have limitations. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the ability to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain mechanisms; for case, there is indication 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 Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these tests would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a sentiment that researchers say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

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

I felt doubtful about my outcome. But after analysis of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping False Alarm Rates

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also astonished. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Plausible Explanations

It was theorized that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and retain faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all happened after a physical event such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of face identification challenges, 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 memory for faces evaluation.

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

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a range, with some people who think each countenance is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding