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During my mid-20s, I noticed my grandma through the window of a café. I felt stunned – she had died the year before. I gazed for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced similar experiences during my life. Occasionally, I "knew" someone I didn't know. Occasionally I could quickly determine who the unfamiliar person resembled – like my grandma. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Range of Face Identification Abilities

Recently, I started wondering if others have these peculiar experiences. When I questioned my companions, one said she frequently sees individuals in unexpected places who look known. Others sometimes confuse a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Facial Recognition Skills

Scientists have created many evaluations to assess the ability to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to know relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recall a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain processes; for instance, there is proof that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a emotion that researchers say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after assessment of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but rarely confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Potential Causes

It was suggested that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and commit faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", 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 attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating 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 "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of documented instances all took place after a medical episode such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

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 dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods 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 long durations of investigation.

"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 every face is recognizable, and others, like me, who only undergo it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding