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Throughout my twenties, I spotted my grandma through the glass of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had departed the prior year. I gazed for a moment, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had comparable occurrences throughout my life. From time to time, I "recognized" a person I had never met. Sometimes I could promptly determine who the unknown individual looked like – for instance my grandmother. On other occasions, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Spectrum of Face Identification Capabilities

In recent times, I started wondering if different individuals have these peculiar experiences. When I inquired my acquaintances, one commented she regularly sees individuals in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others occasionally mistake a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported no such experiences – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

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

Comprehending the Spectrum of Face Identification Skills

Investigators have developed many tests to measure the capacity to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to recognize family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the capacity to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for case, there is indication that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt curious whether these assessments would shed some light on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that scientists say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. 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 precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after evaluation of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a series of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also astonished. I remembered many of the old faces, but rarely mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Potential Reasons

It was suggested that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and commit faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention 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 disposed to notice the stranger who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of documented instances all took place after a physical event such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected HFF in many years of study.

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

{Understanding