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In my young adulthood, I observed my grandma through the window of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had departed the prior year. I looked intently for a short time, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced comparable occurrences throughout my life. Periodically, I "knew" a person I had never met. Occasionally I could promptly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – for instance my elderly relative. In other instances, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Examining the Variety of Face Identification Experiences

Recently, I began questioning if other people have these odd situations. When I asked my acquaintances, one mentioned she often sees individuals in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others sometimes confuse a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Investigators have created many tests to quantify the skill to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to identify kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recall a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain mechanisms; for instance, there is proof that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt curious whether these evaluations would provide insight on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a emotion that experts say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, 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 celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after analysis of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping False Alarm Frequencies

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 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 previously seen countenances, but infrequently mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Possible Causes

It was proposed that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Research suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and retain faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", 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 closely at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests 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. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of reported cases all happened after a health incident such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

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

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

{Understanding