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Throughout my mid-20s, I spotted my grandmother through the window of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the year before. I gazed for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd had comparable situations all through my life. Periodically, I "recognized" a person I was unacquainted with. At times I could rapidly identify who the unknown individual reminded me of – such as my grandma. On other occasions, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Variety of Person Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I started wondering if others have these unusual encounters. When I inquired my companions, one said she often sees persons in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others occasionally mistake a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Investigators have created many evaluations to assess the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to know family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use different brain mechanisms; for example, there is indication that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these assessments would offer understanding on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often remember people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that scientists say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from three angles, then find it in lineups. During another test that instructed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after analysis of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding False Alarm Frequencies

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a series of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also surprised. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Potential Explanations

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to develop and commit faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", 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 attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of reported cases all took place after a medical episode such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

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 perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with possible HFF in many years of investigation.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think each countenance is recognizable, and others, like me, who only encounter it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding