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In my twenties, I noticed my elderly relative through the window of a café. I felt stunned – she had departed the prior year. I stared for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced similar occurrences all through my life. Periodically, I "knew" someone I didn't know. Occasionally I could rapidly determine who the unfamiliar person resembled – such as my grandmother. In other instances, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Spectrum of Face Identification Capabilities

Lately, I began questioning if different individuals have these peculiar experiences. When I questioned my friends, one commented she frequently sees people in random places who look recognizable. Others occasionally mistake a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Comprehending the Range of Face Identification Skills

Researchers have developed many tests to quantify the ability to recall faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to identify family, dear acquaintances 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 believe I fall short. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the ability to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain processes; for example, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt curious whether these assessments would offer understanding on why strangers look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that experts say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

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 lineups. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

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

Understanding False Alarm Frequencies

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a sequence of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also surprised. I recalled many of the old faces, but infrequently mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Possible Reasons

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and store faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of reported cases all took place after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected HFF in many years of research.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think each countenance is known, and others, like me, who only experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding