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In my twenties, I spotted my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the previous year. I looked intently for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced similar situations all through my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" an individual I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could promptly pinpoint who the unknown individual resembled – such as my grandmother. Other times, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Examining the Variety of Face Identification Abilities

Recently, I became curious if others have these odd encounters. When I questioned my friends, one commented she often sees individuals in unexpected places who look known. Others occasionally mistake a stranger or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some described nothing of the kind – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes 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 Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Scientists have developed many tests to measure the skill to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to know kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the skill to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain mechanisms; for case, there is proof that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these tests would shed some light on why strangers look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that experts say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify 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 Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, 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 known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after analysis of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Rates

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a series of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Plausible Explanations

It was proposed that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to develop and store faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Over-familiarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all occurred after a medical episode such as a convulsion 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 facial recognition difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with potential HFF in extended periods of research.

"The frequency 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 undergo it a few times a month.

{Understanding