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During my young adulthood, I noticed my grandma through the pane of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the year before. I looked intently for a moment, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had similar experiences throughout my life. From time to time, I "identified" an individual I had never met. At times I could quickly pinpoint who the unknown individual looked like – such as my grandma. In other instances, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Variety of Person Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I started wondering if other people have these unusual situations. When I asked my companions, one mentioned she frequently sees persons in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others sometimes confuse a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some reported no such experiences – they could effortlessly identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Face Identification Capacities

Scientists have created many evaluations to assess the capacity to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to identify kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But researchers "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain processes; for case, there is indication that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Person Recognition Tests

I felt interested whether these assessments would offer understanding on why unknown people look familiar. 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 over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several facial recognition tests. I completed 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 lineups. 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 exactly identify them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after analysis of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding False Alarm Percentages

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the old faces, but seldom mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Possible Reasons

It was suggested that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and retain faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they identify 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 grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of reported cases all happened after a health incident such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible HFF in extended periods of study.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a range, with some people who think all visages is known, and others, like me, who only experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding