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Throughout my twenties, I spotted my grandmother through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the previous year. I gazed for a short time, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced similar experiences during my life. From time to time, I "identified" someone I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could rapidly pinpoint who the unknown individual resembled – like my elderly relative. In other instances, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Variety of Person Recognition Capabilities

In recent times, I started wondering if others have these peculiar encounters. When I asked my friends, one commented she frequently sees people in random places who look recognizable. Others at times confuse a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described nothing of the kind – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? 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 Continuum of Face Identification Abilities

Researchers have created many tests to measure the ability to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to recognize family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But researchers "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the ability to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain processes; for instance, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these tests would provide insight 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 let down – a emotion that experts say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from three angles, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after assessment of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending False Alarm Percentages

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a string of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also surprised. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but rarely confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Plausible Reasons

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to develop and commit faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they recognize 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 admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of reported cases all occurred after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

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

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think all visages is recognizable, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding