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During my mid-20s, I noticed my grandma through the pane of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had departed the prior year. I looked intently for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered analogous occurrences during my life. Periodically, I "recognized" someone I didn't know. Sometimes I could rapidly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person resembled – like my grandma. In other instances, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Variety of Person Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I became curious if others have these peculiar experiences. When I inquired my acquaintances, one mentioned she regularly sees people in unexpected places who look familiar. Others at times confuse a stranger or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capacities

Scientists have developed many tests to assess the capacity to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to know family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the ability to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain functions; for instance, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Face Identification Tests

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

I received several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused 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 lineups. During another test that told me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my everyday experience.

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

Understanding False Alarm Percentages

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a series of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also surprised. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but infrequently misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Potential Reasons

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Research suggests that the later element helps people to develop and retain faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all occurred after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. 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 few of people with potential HFF in long durations of investigation.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a range, with some people who think each countenance is known, and others, like me, who only experience it a few times a month.

{Understanding