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Throughout my young adulthood, I spotted my elderly relative through the glass of a café. I felt stunned – she had departed the year before. I looked intently for a moment, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd had analogous situations all through my life. Occasionally, I "identified" a person I didn't know. At times I could quickly determine who the unknown individual resembled – for instance my elderly relative. In other instances, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Examining the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I started wondering if other people have these peculiar situations. When I questioned my friends, one mentioned she regularly sees persons in random places who look familiar. Others sometimes mistake a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Comprehending the Range of Facial Recognition Capacities

Scientists have designed many evaluations to measure the skill to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to know family, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recall a face, according to brain researchers. 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 identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that researchers say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white 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 familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt doubtful about my outcome. But after analysis of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding False Alarm Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a sequence of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but seldom confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals 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?

Investigating Potential Explanations

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and commit faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of documented instances all happened after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification challenges, 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 Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with potential HFF in extended periods of investigation.

"The frequency 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 familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding