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Throughout my twenties, I spotted my grandma through the window of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the year before. I stared for a moment, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced comparable occurrences throughout my life. Periodically, I "identified" someone I was unacquainted with. At times I could quickly identify who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – like my elderly relative. In other instances, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Examining the Range of Face Identification Abilities

Recently, I became curious if other people have these peculiar experiences. When I questioned my acquaintances, one said she frequently sees persons in unexpected places who look known. Others at times confuse a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described completely different responses – they could easily recognize 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 elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Understanding the Range of Face Identification Skills

Scientists have designed many evaluations to measure the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to know relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how good someone is at telling 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 examined the skill to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain mechanisms; for instance, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Face Identification Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that experts say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after analysis of my results, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding False Alarm Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a series of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also astonished. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but infrequently confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Plausible Explanations

It was proposed that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and likely near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and retain faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I sat on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of reported cases all occurred after a medical episode such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

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

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

{Understanding