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During my twenties, I spotted my grandmother through the pane of a café. I felt stunned – she had died the previous year. I stared for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered analogous occurrences throughout my life. Periodically, I "identified" an individual I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could quickly determine who the stranger reminded me of – for instance my grandma. Other times, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Range of Person Recognition Experiences

Lately, I began questioning if other people have these odd encounters. When I questioned my companions, one said she frequently sees people in unexpected places who look familiar. Others occasionally confuse a stranger or famous person for someone they know in actual 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 diversity of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies 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 interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Person Recognition Abilities

Scientists have developed many tests to measure the ability to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to recognize relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain mechanisms; for example, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that scientists say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after analysis of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a sequence of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the first set. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 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 content with my performance, but also surprised. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but rarely mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Possible Reasons

It was theorized that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and retain faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", 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 inclined to notice the unknown person who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of documented instances all took place after a health incident such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, 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 suspected HFF in extended periods of research.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think all visages is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a few times a month.

{Understanding