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During my mid-20s, I observed my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had departed the prior year. I stared for a brief period, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced similar occurrences all through my life. From time to time, I "identified" a person I had never met. Occasionally I could promptly determine who the unknown individual looked like – like my grandmother. In other instances, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Examining the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

Recently, I became curious if others have these odd situations. When I asked my friends, one commented she often sees persons in unpredictable places who look known. Others at times mistake a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes 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 interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Investigators have created many tests to quantify the ability to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to recognize kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the capacity to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use different brain mechanisms; for example, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Face Identification Evaluations

I felt curious whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that experts say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, 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 quite place them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after analysis of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping False Alarm Rates

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a string of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also surprised. I recognized many of the old faces, but infrequently mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Possible Reasons

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, assign traits to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Research suggests that the later element helps people to learn and commit faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention 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 disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of reported cases all took place after a health incident such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

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

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

{Understanding