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Throughout my young adulthood, I spotted my grandmother through the glass of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had passed away the previous year. I gazed for a short time, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced comparable experiences during my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" someone I didn't know. At times I could quickly identify who the unknown individual looked like – for instance my grandma. Other times, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Investigating the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Recently, I became curious if other people have these unusual encounters. When I asked my friends, one said she often sees individuals in random places who look known. Others sometimes confuse a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour 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 experience the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Researchers have designed many evaluations to assess the ability to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to recognize family, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But researchers "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the ability to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain functions; for instance, there is evidence that super-recognizers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these tests would provide insight on why strangers look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that scientists say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I received several facial 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 arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – comparable to my actual experience.

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

Comprehending False Alarm Rates

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a string of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also surprised. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but infrequently confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Plausible Explanations

It was proposed that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and store faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", 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 prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the continuum. 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 excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all occurred after a medical episode such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole adult life.

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 dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with possible 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 range, with some people who think every face is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding