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During my mid-20s, I noticed my grandmother through the window of a café. I felt stunned – she had died the prior year. I gazed for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced analogous situations during my life. Occasionally, I "knew" an individual I was unacquainted with. At times I could rapidly pinpoint who the unknown individual resembled – like my elderly relative. Other times, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I started wondering if others have these peculiar experiences. When I asked my companions, one mentioned she regularly sees individuals in random places who look recognizable. Others occasionally misidentify a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some described nothing of the kind – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Face Identification Skills

Researchers have designed many assessments to quantify the skill to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to know family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for example, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that experts say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that directed 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 actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after assessment of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Rates

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a series of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Plausible Causes

It was suggested that I likely possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to develop and commit faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice 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 disposed to notice the stranger who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition 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 "identify" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. On the surface, 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 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 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in long durations of study.

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

{Understanding