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In my mid-20s, I observed my elderly relative through the window of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the prior year. I gazed for a moment, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced analogous experiences all through my life. Periodically, I "knew" an individual I didn't know. Occasionally I could rapidly identify who the unknown individual resembled – for instance my grandma. On other occasions, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I began questioning if different individuals have these odd situations. When I inquired my companions, one mentioned she regularly sees people in random places who look familiar. Others at times confuse a stranger or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some reported no such experiences – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds 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 interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Face Identification Abilities

Scientists have developed many assessments to assess the capacity to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to know kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for example, 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 recognize old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt curious whether these assessments would provide insight on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that experts say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after evaluation of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending False Alarm Percentages

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a series of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also astonished. I recognized 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%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Possible Causes

It was suggested that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and retain faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was thought 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 know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance 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 evaluations helped me understand where I stood on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of reported cases all occurred after a health incident such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. 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 handful of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of study.

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

{Understanding