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During my twenties, I spotted my grandma through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had passed away the prior year. I stared for a moment, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered comparable situations all through my life. From time to time, I "identified" a person I had never met. Occasionally I could rapidly determine who the unknown individual looked like – such as my grandma. On other occasions, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

Lately, I became curious if others have these odd experiences. When I asked my friends, one mentioned she frequently sees persons in random places who look known. Others occasionally misidentify a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of experiences. Was it just yearning 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 make mistakes 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 Abilities

Investigators have designed many assessments to quantify the ability to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to recognize kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the ability to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain mechanisms; for example, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Tests

I felt interested whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a feeling that scientists say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, 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 recognizable, but I couldn't quite place them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after analysis of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a string of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also surprised. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals 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 Causes

It was theorized that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to develop and store faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a syndrome called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of reported cases all occurred after a health incident such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with potential HFF in long durations of investigation.

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

{Understanding