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In my twenties, I noticed my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had passed away the prior year. I looked intently for a short time, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered similar situations during my life. From time to time, I "knew" a person I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could promptly pinpoint who the unknown individual looked like – such as my grandmother. In other instances, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Examining the Range of Person Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I began questioning if others have these unusual situations. When I inquired my companions, one mentioned she often sees individuals in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others sometimes misidentify a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Investigators have created many tests to measure the ability to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to recognize relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how proficient someone is at telling 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 looked at the capacity to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain mechanisms; for case, there is indication that super-recognizers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these tests would shed some light on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that experts say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I received several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled 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 instructed 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 – similar to my actual experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after analysis of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending False Alarm Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they review a series of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the first set. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but seldom confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Potential Causes

It was theorized that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to learn and store faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged 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. Researching further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of reported cases all took place after a medical episode such as a convulsion or brain attack, 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 face identification difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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

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

{Understanding