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Throughout my twenties, I spotted my grandma through the pane of a café. I felt astonished – she had died the previous year. I stared for a short time, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had comparable situations during my life. Occasionally, I "knew" a person I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could quickly pinpoint who the unknown individual resembled – like my elderly relative. In other instances, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Spectrum of Face Identification Abilities

In recent times, I became curious if different individuals have these odd experiences. When I asked my friends, one commented she frequently sees individuals in random places who look familiar. Others at times misidentify a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some described completely different responses – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Spectrum of Face Identification Capacities

Scientists have designed many evaluations to measure the skill to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who recognize 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 kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But researchers "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the ability to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain processes; for instance, there is evidence that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Person Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these assessments would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that researchers say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I received several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, then find it in lineups. During another test that instructed me to pick out famous people 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 uncertain about my outcome. But after analysis of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending False Alarm Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also surprised. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Possible Causes

It was suggested that I likely possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to develop and retain faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively 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 confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of documented instances all happened after a physical event such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing 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 face identification problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a continuum, with some people who think each countenance is recognizable, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding