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During my twenties, I noticed my grandmother through the pane of a café. I felt astonished – she had departed the prior year. I gazed for a brief period, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced analogous experiences during my life. From time to time, I "recognized" a person I had never met. At times I could promptly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person looked like – such as my elderly relative. Other times, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Investigating the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I started wondering if different individuals have these unusual encounters. When I questioned my companions, one said she often sees persons in unpredictable places who look known. Others sometimes mistake a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could effortlessly identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes 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.

Understanding the Spectrum of Face Identification Abilities

Scientists have designed many assessments to measure the ability to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to identify relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But researchers "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the ability to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain mechanisms; for instance, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt curious whether these assessments would offer understanding on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that scientists say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after assessment of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a string of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the first set. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also astonished. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but seldom confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Potential Explanations

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, assign traits to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and retain faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I stood on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of documented instances all occurred after a medical episode such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including perceptual alterations, 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 few of people with possible HFF in long durations of investigation.

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

{Understanding