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In my twenties, I noticed my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had departed the year before. I looked intently for a short time, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced comparable situations throughout my life. From time to time, I "recognized" an individual I didn't know. Sometimes I could promptly identify who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – such as my elderly relative. In other instances, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Examining the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

Recently, I started wondering if other people have these odd situations. When I asked my companions, one commented she frequently sees individuals in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others sometimes misidentify a stranger or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some described no such experiences – they could effortlessly identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma 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 have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Person Recognition Skills

Researchers have designed many evaluations to quantify the ability to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to recognize kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the ability to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain processes; for example, there is evidence that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would shed some light on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that researchers say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that told me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after evaluation of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending False Alarm Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a string of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also surprised. I recognized many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Plausible Explanations

It was proposed that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to develop and store faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition 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 elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These assessments 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. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of documented instances all occurred after a physical event such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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

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

{Understanding