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Throughout my twenties, I spotted my grandmother through the glass of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had passed away the prior year. I gazed for a short time, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered comparable experiences all through my life. Periodically, I "identified" someone I had never met. Occasionally I could rapidly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – such as my grandmother. In other instances, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Variety of Person Recognition Capabilities

In recent times, I started wondering if different individuals have these unusual experiences. When I inquired my companions, one said she frequently sees individuals in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others at times misidentify a stranger or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some reported completely different responses – 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 grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Person Recognition Abilities

Researchers have created many tests to quantify the ability to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to identify relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the skill to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use different brain processes; for case, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Assessments

I felt interested whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that scientists say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after assessment of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a series of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also astonished. I recalled many of the old faces, but seldom mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Plausible Explanations

It was suggested that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, assign traits to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to develop and retain faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests 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. Examining further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all happened after a medical episode such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in many years of research.

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

{Understanding