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During my mid-20s, I observed my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had departed the year before. I gazed for a short time, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd had analogous occurrences during my life. Occasionally, I "identified" an individual I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could promptly determine who the unfamiliar person resembled – like my elderly relative. In other instances, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Variety of Face Identification Abilities

Lately, I started wondering if other people have these peculiar encounters. When I questioned my friends, one said she frequently sees persons in unpredictable places who look known. Others at times mistake a stranger or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Comprehending the Spectrum of Face Identification Skills

Investigators have designed many assessments to measure the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to recognize family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use different brain mechanisms; for case, there is indication that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Face Identification Evaluations

I felt curious 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 let down – a sentiment that scientists say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, 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 – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my outcome. But after evaluation of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a string of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the old faces, but infrequently misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Possible Reasons

It was proposed that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and commit faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of reported cases all happened after a health incident such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing 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 difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible HFF in long durations of investigation.

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

{Understanding