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During my young adulthood, I noticed my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had passed away the year before. I looked intently for a moment, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced analogous situations throughout my life. Periodically, I "identified" an individual I had never met. Occasionally I could quickly pinpoint who the stranger reminded me of – for instance my grandmother. In other instances, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Variety of Person Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I became curious if other people have these peculiar experiences. When I asked my companions, one mentioned she often sees people in unpredictable places who look known. Others sometimes confuse a stranger or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative 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 beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Facial Recognition Skills

Researchers have developed many assessments to assess the capacity to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to identify relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the ability to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain mechanisms; for instance, there is proof that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Evaluations

I felt curious whether these assessments would offer understanding on why strangers look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that experts say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my real-life experience.

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

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 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 satisfied with my result, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the old faces, but rarely mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Potential Causes

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, assign traits to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to learn and commit faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity 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 "know" strangers. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of reported cases all took place after a physical event such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with possible HFF in extended periods of study.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think all visages is known, and others, like me, who only encounter it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding