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Throughout my twenties, I spotted my grandmother through the glass of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the year before. I looked intently for a brief period, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced comparable occurrences during my life. Occasionally, I "identified" someone I had never met. At times I could promptly identify who the stranger reminded me of – like my grandmother. In other instances, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Range of Face Identification Capabilities

Recently, I started wondering if different individuals have these odd situations. When I asked my friends, one said she frequently sees persons in unpredictable places who look known. Others sometimes mistake a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity 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 14 minutes 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 Spectrum of Facial Recognition Skills

Researchers have created many assessments to assess the ability to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to recognize family, dear acquaintances 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 thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain mechanisms; for instance, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that experts say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several face identification tests. I waded 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 three angles, then find it in arrays. During another test that instructed 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 everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after analysis of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping False Alarm Rates

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a string of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also surprised. I remembered many of the old faces, but rarely misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Plausible Reasons

It was theorized that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, assign traits to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to learn and retain faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Researching further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of documented instances all happened after a health incident such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in long durations of research.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a continuum, with some people who think every face is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a few times a month.

{Understanding