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In my mid-20s, I spotted my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the previous year. I stared for a brief period, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered analogous situations during my life. Occasionally, I "identified" someone I didn't know. Sometimes I could rapidly identify who the stranger reminded me of – for instance my grandma. On other occasions, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Examining the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

Lately, I began questioning if others have these unusual encounters. When I asked my acquaintances, one commented she often sees people in random places who look known. Others at times misidentify a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds 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.

Grasping the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Skills

Scientists have designed many tests to quantify the capacity to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to identify family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the skill to recall a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain processes; for example, there is indication that super-recognizers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Face Identification Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a feeling that scientists say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I received several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling confused 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 arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out public figures 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 uncertain about my results. But after analysis of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a series of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also surprised. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Possible Explanations

It was suggested that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and store faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was thought 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 closely at faces, I am prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all occurred after a medical episode such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, 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 liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

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 speculated that there may be a continuum, with some people who think each countenance is recognizable, and others, like me, who only experience it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding