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Throughout my twenties, I noticed my grandmother through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had departed the prior year. I looked intently for a short time, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered comparable situations throughout my life. From time to time, I "identified" an individual I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could rapidly determine who the stranger looked like – such as my grandma. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Examining the Range of Face Identification Experiences

Lately, I began questioning if other people have these peculiar experiences. When I asked my friends, one commented she regularly sees people in random places who look familiar. Others sometimes misidentify a stranger or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described nothing of the kind – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Understanding the Range of Facial Recognition Skills

Scientists have created many evaluations to quantify the capacity to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to recognize kin, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the skill to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain mechanisms; for instance, there is proof that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would provide insight on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a emotion that researchers say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, 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 familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after evaluation of my performance, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a series of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also surprised. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Potential Explanations

It was suggested that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. 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 detailed catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to develop and retain faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", 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 inclined to notice the unknown person who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Over-familiarity 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. Examining further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all happened after a health incident such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity 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 facial recognition difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with potential HFF in long durations of investigation.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a range, with some people who think every face is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding