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During my young adulthood, I observed my grandma through the window of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the previous year. I gazed for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd had comparable occurrences throughout my life. From time to time, I "knew" someone I didn't know. At times I could rapidly identify who the stranger reminded me of – for instance my grandma. On other occasions, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Examining the Variety of Facial Recognition Abilities

Recently, I became curious if other people have these peculiar experiences. When I questioned my companions, one said she regularly sees people in unexpected places who look known. Others occasionally misidentify a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some described nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Scientists have designed many evaluations to assess the skill 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 family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain functions; for example, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Assessments

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 disheartened – a sentiment that scientists say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that directed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after assessment of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they review a string of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the first set. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also astonished. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Possible Explanations

It was suggested that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to develop and retain faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance 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 assessments 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 disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all happened after a health incident such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible HFF in extended periods of research.

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

{Understanding