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Throughout my mid-20s, I spotted my elderly relative through the window of a café. I felt stunned – she had died the previous year. I stared for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered analogous experiences during my life. Periodically, I "identified" someone I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could promptly identify who the stranger looked like – such as my grandma. Other times, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Variety of Person Recognition Experiences

Recently, I became curious if different individuals have these odd encounters. When I questioned my friends, one mentioned she regularly sees individuals in random places who look familiar. Others sometimes confuse a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described no such experiences – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Face Identification Skills

Investigators have created many evaluations to measure the ability to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to identify family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the capacity to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for instance, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Tests

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

I obtained several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped 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 public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after analysis of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding False Alarm Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but seldom misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Potential Causes

It was theorized that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and commit faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was thought 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 identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These tests 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. Examining further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of reported cases all took place after a medical episode such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with possible HFF in extended periods of study.

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

{Understanding