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Throughout my twenties, I observed my grandmother through the window of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had departed the year before. I gazed for a brief period, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd had comparable experiences all through my life. From time to time, I "knew" a person I had never met. Occasionally I could quickly pinpoint who the unknown individual resembled – like my elderly relative. On other occasions, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Examining the Variety of Facial Recognition Capabilities

In recent times, I became curious if different individuals have these peculiar experiences. When I asked my friends, one mentioned she frequently sees people in random places who look known. Others at times confuse a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? 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 experience the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Face Identification Skills

Investigators have designed many evaluations to quantify the capacity to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to know kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recall a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain mechanisms; for example, there is proof that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Face Identification Evaluations

I felt curious whether these assessments would offer understanding on why strangers look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that researchers say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, then find it in arrays. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

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

Grasping False Alarm Rates

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also surprised. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Possible Explanations

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and commit faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of documented instances all happened after a medical episode such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

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

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a range, with some people who think each countenance is recognizable, and others, like me, who only undergo it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding