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In my twenties, I spotted my grandmother through the glass of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had passed away the previous year. I gazed for a brief period, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced analogous experiences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "identified" someone I didn't know. At times I could rapidly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – such as my elderly relative. In other instances, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Variety of Person Recognition Abilities

Lately, I became curious if others have these unusual experiences. When I questioned my friends, one commented she regularly sees persons in random places who look familiar. Others sometimes confuse a stranger or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour 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 experience the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Person Recognition Skills

Scientists have designed many assessments to measure the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are superior face rememberers, who remember 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 identify relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the skill to recall a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain functions; for example, there is proof that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these assessments would shed some light on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a feeling that experts say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that told me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after evaluation of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding False Alarm Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but rarely confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Possible Reasons

It was suggested that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and store faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations 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. Researching further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of reported cases all took place after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in long durations 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 all visages is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding