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In my mid-20s, I spotted my grandmother through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had died the prior year. I looked intently for a brief period, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd had analogous experiences all through my life. Periodically, I "recognized" an individual I had never met. Occasionally I could rapidly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – such as my grandmother. Other times, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Spectrum of Face Identification Capabilities

Recently, I became curious if others have these unusual situations. When I inquired my acquaintances, one commented she frequently sees individuals in random places who look known. Others at times mistake a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some reported no such experiences – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes 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 experience the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Person Recognition Capacities

Researchers have created many tests to measure the skill to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to identify relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the skill to recall a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use different brain mechanisms; for instance, there is proof that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these tests would provide insight on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that researchers say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after evaluation of my results, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending False Alarm Rates

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they review a string of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer cutoff 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 content with my score, but also astonished. I recalled many of the old faces, but seldom confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Examining Potential Explanations

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and commit faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative 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 incorrect identification moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of reported cases all took place after a health incident such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing 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 challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with possible HFF in many years 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 familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding