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Throughout my mid-20s, I noticed my grandma through the glass of a café. I felt astonished – she had died the year before. I gazed for a short time, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered analogous situations all through my life. Periodically, I "recognized" a person I didn't know. Occasionally I could quickly identify who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my grandmother. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Range of Facial Recognition Experiences

Lately, I started wondering if different individuals have these odd encounters. When I asked my acquaintances, one mentioned she often sees people in unpredictable places who look known. Others occasionally confuse a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of responses. Was it just desire 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 have inaccuracies sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Face Identification Abilities

Investigators have created many tests to quantify the ability to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to know family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the skill to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain mechanisms; for instance, there is proof that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Face Identification Tests

I felt curious whether these tests would provide insight on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that researchers say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in lineups. During another test that directed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after assessment of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping False Alarm Rates

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but rarely confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Plausible Reasons

It was suggested that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to develop and commit faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of reported cases all happened after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in extended periods of research.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a range, with some people who think all visages is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding