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Throughout my mid-20s, I observed my grandma through the window of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the prior year. I stared for a moment, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd had similar occurrences all through my life. From time to time, I "knew" an individual I had never met. At times I could quickly identify who the unknown individual resembled – like my grandma. On other occasions, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Investigating the Range of Person Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I began questioning if other people have these odd experiences. When I inquired my acquaintances, one said she frequently sees individuals in random places who look known. Others sometimes confuse a stranger or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described nothing of the kind – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour 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 experience the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Investigators have created many evaluations to quantify the ability to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to recognize relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the capacity to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain mechanisms; for instance, there is indication that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Person Recognition Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that scientists say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several face identification 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 different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my everyday experience.

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

Grasping Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a string of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content 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 score on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Plausible Reasons

It was suggested that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and commit faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me remember 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 engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of reported cases all happened after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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 hypothesized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think each countenance is known, and others, like me, who only experience it a few times a month.

{Understanding