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During my young adulthood, I spotted my grandma through the window of a café. I felt astonished – she had departed the year before. I looked intently for a short time, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had analogous experiences all through my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" an individual I had never met. At times I could rapidly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person resembled – like my elderly relative. On other occasions, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Variety of Person Recognition Capabilities

In recent times, I started wondering if others have these odd encounters. When I inquired my acquaintances, one commented she frequently sees people in unpredictable places who look known. Others sometimes misidentify a stranger or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Face Identification Skills

Researchers have designed many tests to quantify the skill to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to know family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain functions; for case, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these assessments would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that scientists say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, then find it in groups. During another test that directed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after analysis of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a series of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Possible Reasons

It was suggested that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, assign traits to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to develop and retain faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of reported cases all happened after a medical episode such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in long durations of research.

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

{Understanding