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In my young adulthood, I observed my grandma through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had passed away the previous year. I stared for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered analogous situations during my life. From time to time, I "recognized" an individual I didn't know. At times I could quickly identify who the unfamiliar person resembled – for instance my grandmother. On other occasions, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Investigating the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I became curious if others have these odd situations. When I asked my acquaintances, one said she frequently sees persons in unpredictable places who look known. Others occasionally confuse a stranger or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described no such experiences – they could effortlessly identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research 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 Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Investigators have created many assessments to assess the capacity to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to recognize relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the capacity to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain functions; for case, there is indication that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Evaluations

I felt interested whether these tests would shed some light on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that experts say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white 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 quite place them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after assessment of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding False Alarm Percentages

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also astonished. I remembered many of the old faces, but infrequently misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Plausible Causes

It was suggested that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and commit faces to long-term memory. While differentiating 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 carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations 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" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all took place after a health incident such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, 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 tools like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of investigation.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a continuum, with some people who think every face is known, and others, like me, who only experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding