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During my mid-20s, I observed my grandmother through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the prior year. I looked intently for a short time, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd had analogous situations during my life. Periodically, I "identified" someone I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could quickly identify who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – like my grandmother. On other occasions, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Range of Face Identification Experiences

Recently, I began questioning if other people have these unusual situations. When I asked my companions, one commented she regularly sees individuals in random places who look known. Others sometimes confuse a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Facial Recognition Skills

Scientists have designed many tests to assess the skill to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one side 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 prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to identify kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But researchers "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain processes; for instance, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that experts say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed 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 performance, 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 Frequencies

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a series of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also surprised. I remembered many of the old faces, but infrequently misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Plausible Causes

It was suggested that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to develop and commit faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments 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. Researching further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of documented instances all occurred after a health incident such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with suspected HFF in long durations of investigation.

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

{Understanding