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During my young adulthood, I spotted my grandmother through the glass of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the prior year. I gazed for a moment, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd had comparable situations all through my life. Occasionally, I "identified" a person I was unacquainted with. At times I could promptly pinpoint who the unknown individual looked like – for instance my grandmother. In other instances, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Investigating the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Experiences

Lately, I became curious if different individuals have these peculiar encounters. When I questioned my acquaintances, one commented she frequently sees persons in unpredictable places who look known. Others occasionally confuse a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Person Recognition Capacities

Investigators have designed many assessments to measure the capacity to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to recognize family, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the ability to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use different brain mechanisms; for instance, there is proof 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.

Completing Face Identification Assessments

I felt interested whether these assessments would offer understanding on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that researchers say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities 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 outcome. But after analysis of my results, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping False Alarm Rates

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a string of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also astonished. I recalled many of the old faces, but seldom misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Plausible Causes

It was proposed that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and likely near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to develop and commit faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Examining 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 pertain to me. But the small number of documented instances all took place after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with possible HFF in many years of investigation.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think each countenance is known, and others, like me, who only encounter it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding