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Throughout my mid-20s, I spotted my grandma through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had passed away the prior year. I gazed for a moment, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced comparable situations during my life. Occasionally, I "identified" a person I had never met. At times I could quickly pinpoint who the unknown individual reminded me of – such as my elderly relative. In other instances, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Examining the Range of Person Recognition Experiences

Recently, I began questioning if other people have these unusual experiences. When I inquired my acquaintances, one commented she frequently sees persons in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others sometimes misidentify a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in actual 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 spectrum of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Skills

Scientists have designed many evaluations to assess the ability to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to identify family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain functions; for instance, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt curious whether these assessments would provide insight on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a feeling that scientists say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white 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 exactly identify them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after assessment of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding False Alarm Rates

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a string of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but infrequently confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Examining Possible Causes

It was proposed that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to learn and commit faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus 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 disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all happened after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a continuum, with some people who think all visages is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding