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Throughout my twenties, I noticed my grandmother through the pane of a café. I felt stunned – she had died the prior year. I stared for a brief period, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd had similar situations all through my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" someone I had never met. At times I could quickly determine who the stranger resembled – such as my grandmother. In other instances, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I became curious if others have these odd encounters. When I inquired my friends, one mentioned she frequently sees people in random places who look recognizable. Others sometimes misidentify a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some reported completely different responses – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation 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 perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Face Identification Capacities

Investigators have designed many assessments to assess the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to recognize family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the skill to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain processes; for case, there is evidence that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these tests would shed some light on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that experts say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, 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 recognizable, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my everyday experience.

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

Understanding False Alarm Percentages

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they review a series of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the old faces, but rarely mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Possible Explanations

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and store faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother 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 mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I stood on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" strangers. Researching further, I read about a syndrome called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of documented instances all happened after a health incident such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with possible HFF in long durations of study.

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

{Understanding