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Throughout my young adulthood, I noticed my grandmother through the glass of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had died the prior year. I looked intently for a brief period, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd had similar experiences throughout my life. From time to time, I "recognized" someone I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could promptly pinpoint who the unknown individual resembled – like my elderly relative. In other instances, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Variety of Person Recognition Experiences

Lately, I began questioning if different individuals have these peculiar situations. When I inquired my acquaintances, one commented she regularly sees persons in random places who look known. Others sometimes confuse a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described no such experiences – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Comprehending the Range of Face Identification Capacities

Researchers have designed many evaluations to measure the skill to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to identify kin, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the capacity to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for case, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Face Identification Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these tests would provide insight on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that scientists say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped 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 groups. During another test that directed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after assessment of my performance, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending False Alarm Rates

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a series of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also surprised. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Possible Explanations

It was proposed that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Research suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and store faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

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 carefully at faces, I am disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of reported cases all happened after a medical episode such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. 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 few of people with potential HFF in long durations of research.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think all visages is recognizable, and others, like me, who only undergo it a few times a month.

{Understanding