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Throughout my twenties, I observed my elderly relative through the window of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the year before. I looked intently for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered analogous occurrences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" an individual I had never met. Occasionally I could rapidly identify who the stranger reminded me of – for instance my grandma. Other times, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Variety of Person Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I began questioning if different individuals have these peculiar experiences. When I inquired my acquaintances, one said she regularly sees individuals in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others at times mistake a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some described no such experiences – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research has found we spend about 14 minutes 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 perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Skills

Researchers have designed many evaluations to measure the capacity to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to know kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain mechanisms; for example, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Tests

I felt interested whether these tests would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that experts say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several facial recognition 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 multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't quite place them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after evaluation of my performance, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

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

Investigating Possible Causes

It was suggested that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and retain faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all took place after a health incident such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with suspected HFF in many years of study.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a continuum, with some people who think all visages is recognizable, and others, like me, who only experience it a few times a month.

{Understanding