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During my young adulthood, I noticed my grandmother through the window of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had died the prior year. I stared for a brief period, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered analogous experiences throughout my life. Periodically, I "knew" an individual I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could promptly determine who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – for instance my elderly relative. On other occasions, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Investigating the Variety of Facial Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I started wondering if other people have these peculiar situations. When I asked my friends, one mentioned she regularly sees individuals in unexpected places who look known. Others at times confuse a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Comprehending the Range of Person Recognition Capacities

Researchers have designed many tests to quantify the capacity to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to identify family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But researchers "haven't extensively researched 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 mechanisms; for example, there is proof that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Face Identification Tests

I felt curious whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that researchers say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I received several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, then find it in lineups. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after evaluation of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a string of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also astonished. I recognized many of the old faces, but seldom mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger'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 near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and commit faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who resembles my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition 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 "identify" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of reported cases all happened after a medical episode such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

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

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible HFF in long durations of investigation.

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

{Understanding