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During my young adulthood, I spotted my elderly relative through the window of a café. I felt astonished – she had departed the previous year. I gazed for a short time, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had comparable occurrences throughout my life. Periodically, I "recognized" a person I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could quickly determine who the stranger reminded me of – like my grandmother. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Examining the Variety of Facial Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I became curious if others have these odd encounters. When I inquired my companions, one said she regularly sees persons in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others sometimes confuse a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some reported no such experiences – they could effortlessly identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation 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 interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Range of Facial Recognition Skills

Researchers have developed many evaluations to assess the ability to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to identify family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain processes; for instance, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Face Identification Tests

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that researchers say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I received several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused 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 arrays. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after analysis of my performance, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping False Alarm Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a series of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also astonished. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but infrequently misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Possible Causes

It was theorized that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and likely near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and commit faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", 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 attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance 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 range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of reported cases all happened after a medical episode such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces 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 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 known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding