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Throughout my twenties, I noticed my grandma through the pane of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had died the year before. I stared for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd had analogous experiences throughout my life. Periodically, I "recognized" an individual I didn't know. Sometimes I could quickly identify who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – such as my grandmother. Other times, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Examining the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I became curious if others have these peculiar situations. When I inquired my companions, one mentioned she often sees persons in random places who look recognizable. Others at times misidentify a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described no such experiences – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research 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 interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Person Recognition Capacities

Scientists have created many tests to measure the skill to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to know family, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the ability to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain mechanisms; for case, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these tests would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that experts say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several facial recognition tests. I worked 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 lineups. During another test that told 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 actual experience.

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

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they review a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also astonished. I recognized many of the old faces, but seldom mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Plausible Reasons

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and store faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of reported cases all happened after a medical episode such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, 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 dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of investigation.

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

{Understanding