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In my young adulthood, I noticed my elderly relative through the window of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the prior year. I stared for a brief period, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced similar occurrences throughout my life. Periodically, I "identified" someone I had never met. Sometimes I could promptly determine who the stranger resembled – for instance my grandmother. On other occasions, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Variety of Facial Recognition Experiences

Lately, I started wondering if others have these odd encounters. When I asked my friends, one commented she frequently sees people in random places who look known. Others at times mistake a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated 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 make mistakes sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

Investigators have created many tests to quantify the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to recognize relatives, close friends 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 am deficient. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the ability to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain functions; for example, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Person Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these tests would shed some light on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that researchers say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent 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 three angles, then find it in arrays. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after analysis of my performance, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping False Alarm Rates

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a series of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also astonished. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but seldom confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Plausible Causes

It was proposed that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to develop and retain faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations 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" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of reported cases all occurred after a health incident such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing 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 facial recognition difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected HFF in many years of study.

"The occurrence rate 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 few times a month.

{Understanding