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In my twenties, I noticed my elderly relative through the window of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the prior year. I looked intently for a brief period, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd had comparable experiences throughout my life. From time to time, I "identified" an individual I had never met. Occasionally I could quickly identify who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my elderly relative. Other times, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Investigating the Spectrum of Person Recognition Experiences

Recently, I started wondering if different individuals have these peculiar situations. When I questioned my friends, one commented she regularly sees individuals in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others occasionally mistake a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some reported completely different responses – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of perceptions. Was it just yearning 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 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 designed many assessments to measure the ability to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to identify kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the skill to recall a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain processes; for case, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Evaluations

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 remember me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that experts say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, 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 familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my actual experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after evaluation of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping False Alarm Rates

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a string of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also astonished. I remembered many of the old faces, but rarely misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Potential Causes

It was proposed that I probably possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and store faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of reported cases all occurred after a health incident such as a convulsion or stroke, 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 facial recognition challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in extended periods of research.

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

{Understanding