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Throughout my young adulthood, I observed my grandma through the glass of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had departed the year before. I looked intently for a moment, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had comparable experiences during my life. Occasionally, I "knew" an individual I had never met. Occasionally I could rapidly pinpoint who the unknown individual resembled – such as my grandmother. Other times, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Variety of Facial Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I started wondering if other people have these peculiar situations. When I asked my friends, one said she regularly sees persons in unexpected places who look known. Others at times mistake a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some reported completely different responses – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour 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 interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Face Identification Capacities

Researchers have created many assessments to assess the skill to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to know family, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain processes; for example, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these tests would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a sentiment 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 facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that told me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

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

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the old faces, but seldom 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, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Plausible Explanations

It was suggested that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to develop and retain faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Researching further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of reported cases all happened after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with potential HFF in many years of investigation.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a range, with some people who think all visages is recognizable, and others, like me, who only experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding