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Throughout my mid-20s, I spotted my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had departed the previous year. I stared for a brief period, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced analogous situations throughout my life. Periodically, I "identified" an individual I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could promptly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – like my grandmother. On other occasions, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Variety of Facial Recognition Abilities

Lately, I became curious if different individuals have these unusual situations. When I inquired my friends, one commented she frequently sees persons in unpredictable places who look known. Others sometimes confuse a stranger or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds 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.

Understanding the Continuum of Person Recognition Skills

Scientists have created many evaluations to measure the capacity to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize family, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use different brain processes; for instance, 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 recall old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these tests would offer understanding on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that experts say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

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 multiple perspectives, then find it in arrays. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after evaluation of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also astonished. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but seldom confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Potential Reasons

It was proposed that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and retain faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, 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 identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of reported cases all occurred after a health incident such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, 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 memory for faces evaluation.

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

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think every face is familiar, and others, like me, who only undergo it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding