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Throughout my twenties, I noticed my elderly relative through the window of a café. I felt stunned – she had passed away the prior year. I stared for a moment, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced similar situations all through my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" an individual I had never met. At times I could quickly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – like my grandmother. Other times, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Exploring the Variety of Face Identification Experiences

Lately, I started wondering if other people have these unusual situations. When I questioned my friends, one mentioned she often sees people in random places who look familiar. Others at times confuse a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some described no such experiences – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Researchers have developed many assessments to assess the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the skill to recall a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain processes; for instance, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Tests

I felt curious whether these evaluations 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 recognize me, and feel let down – a sentiment that experts say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, 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 public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after analysis of my performance, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Rates

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also surprised. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but infrequently mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Possible Reasons

It was suggested that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and commit faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they recognize 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 grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all took place after a health incident such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible HFF in long durations of research.

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

{Understanding