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In my mid-20s, I spotted my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the year before. I stared for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered comparable experiences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "identified" someone I was unacquainted with. At times I could rapidly identify who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my grandma. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Examining the Spectrum of Face Identification Abilities

Recently, I started wondering if different individuals have these odd situations. When I questioned my friends, one commented she regularly sees persons in unpredictable places who look known. Others sometimes mistake a stranger or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some described no such experiences – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of responses. Was it just longing 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 have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Face Identification Capacities

Investigators have developed many assessments to assess the skill to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to know family, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the skill to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain functions; for instance, there is proof that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Face Identification Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these tests would shed some light on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that researchers say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, then find it in lineups. 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 precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after evaluation of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also astonished. I remembered many of the old faces, but rarely mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Potential Explanations

It was suggested that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and store faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like 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 Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of reported cases all occurred after a medical episode such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing 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 face identification problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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

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

{Understanding