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During my young adulthood, I observed my grandma through the pane of a café. I felt astonished – she had departed the year before. I gazed for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered comparable situations throughout my life. From time to time, I "recognized" someone I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could promptly determine who the unknown individual reminded me of – such as my grandma. In other instances, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Recently, I started wondering if different individuals have these odd situations. When I asked my companions, one commented she regularly sees people in random places who look familiar. Others at times confuse a stranger or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range 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 beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Investigators have designed many tests to assess the skill to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to recognize kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the ability to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain processes; for case, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt curious whether these evaluations would provide insight on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that researchers say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in lineups. During another test that instructed 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 actual experience.

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

Grasping False Alarm Rates

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a series of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also surprised. I recognized many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Examining Plausible Explanations

It was suggested that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to develop and store faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they know 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 acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all took place after a medical episode such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition difficulties, 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 Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with possible HFF in extended periods of investigation.

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

{Understanding