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In my mid-20s, I observed my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had departed the year before. I stared for a moment, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced similar experiences all through my life. From time to time, I "knew" someone I had never met. At times I could rapidly determine who the stranger looked like – for instance my grandmother. In other instances, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Examining the Range of Face Identification Experiences

In recent times, I began questioning if others have these peculiar situations. When I asked my companions, one said she frequently sees persons in unexpected places who look familiar. Others sometimes mistake a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some described no such experiences – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Face Identification Capacities

Researchers have created many evaluations to assess the skill to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to know kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the ability to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain processes; for case, there is proof that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Person Recognition Tests

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a emotion that experts say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in lineups. During another test that directed 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 – comparable to my real-life experience.

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

Grasping False Alarm Frequencies

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also surprised. I recognized many of the old faces, but seldom mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Possible Reasons

It was suggested that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to develop and store faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", 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 carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all occurred after a physical event such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. 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 handful of people with potential HFF in extended periods of study.

"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 all visages is recognizable, and others, like me, who only experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding