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In my twenties, I noticed my grandmother through the glass of a café. I felt astonished – she had departed the prior year. I stared for a short time, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered comparable situations during my life. From time to time, I "knew" an individual I didn't know. At times I could quickly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – like my elderly relative. On other occasions, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Variety of Face Identification Capabilities

Lately, I began questioning if others have these odd encounters. When I asked my acquaintances, one mentioned she frequently sees people in unexpected places who look familiar. Others sometimes misidentify a stranger or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some reported completely different responses – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

Researchers have created many evaluations to assess the skill to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to know family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the capacity to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. 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 remember old faces.

Taking Face Identification Tests

I felt curious whether these assessments would shed some light on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that researchers say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't quite place them – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after assessment of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Rates

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, 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 metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Potential Causes

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a inventory 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 possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to develop and retain faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (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 convulsion or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. 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 few of people with suspected HFF in many years of study.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a range, with some people who think every face is known, and others, like me, who only encounter it a few times a month.

{Understanding