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Throughout my mid-20s, I spotted my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had departed the previous year. I stared for a short time, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered analogous situations during my life. From time to time, I "knew" someone I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could rapidly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – such as my grandma. Other times, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Examining the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Experiences

Lately, I began questioning if other people have these odd experiences. When I inquired my companions, one said she regularly sees individuals in unexpected places who look familiar. Others occasionally misidentify a unknown person or celebrity 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 intrigued by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research has found we spend about 14 minutes 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 interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Person Recognition Skills

Investigators have designed many assessments to measure the ability to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to recognize relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain mechanisms; for case, there is indication that super-recognizers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Face Identification Tests

I felt intrigued whether these tests would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that experts say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several face identification tests. I worked 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 lineups. 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 quite place them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after assessment of my performance, I had accurately recognized 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a series of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also astonished. I recognized many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Possible Reasons

It was theorized that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and store faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed 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 "identify" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of reported cases all occurred after a health incident such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of face identification challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in many years of investigation.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think each countenance is familiar, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding