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In my young adulthood, I spotted my grandmother through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had passed away the previous year. I gazed for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced comparable situations during my life. From time to time, I "recognized" someone I had never met. At times I could rapidly identify who the stranger resembled – like my elderly relative. Other times, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Variety of Face Identification Abilities

Lately, I started wondering if others have these peculiar experiences. When I asked my companions, one said she often sees people in random places who look known. Others sometimes confuse a stranger or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some reported completely different responses – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Comprehending the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

Scientists have created many assessments to assess the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to identify kin, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain processes; for case, there is indication that super-recognizers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt interested whether these tests would shed some light on why strangers look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that scientists say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that told 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 uncertain about my performance. But after analysis of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping False Alarm Frequencies

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the old faces, but seldom confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Plausible Causes

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, assign traits to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to develop and commit faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of documented instances all occurred after a health incident such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing 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 problems, including visual distortions, 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 handful of people with possible HFF in extended periods of research.

"The occurrence rate 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 recognizable, and others, like me, who only encounter it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding