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During my mid-20s, I spotted my grandma through the pane of a café. I felt astonished – she had died the prior year. I stared for a short time, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered analogous occurrences during my life. Occasionally, I "identified" an individual I didn't know. At times I could rapidly pinpoint who the unknown individual resembled – for instance my grandma. In other instances, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Examining the Range of Facial Recognition Experiences

Recently, I became curious if other people have these peculiar experiences. When I inquired my acquaintances, one said she regularly sees individuals in unexpected places who look known. Others sometimes confuse a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described completely different responses – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Person Recognition Skills

Investigators have developed many assessments to quantify the skill to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to recognize family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain processes; for case, there is indication that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Face Identification Assessments

I felt interested whether these assessments would provide insight on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often remember people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that scientists say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

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 grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after assessment of my results, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a string of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but rarely misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Possible Explanations

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to learn and commit faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations 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" strangers. Examining further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of documented instances all occurred after a physical event such as a epileptic episode 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 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. 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 small number of people with possible HFF in extended periods of research.

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

{Understanding