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During my twenties, I observed my grandma through the window of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the previous year. I looked intently for a moment, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered similar experiences during my life. Occasionally, I "knew" someone I had never met. Occasionally I could quickly determine who the stranger reminded me of – such as my grandmother. Other times, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Range of Facial Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I became curious if other people have these odd encounters. When I questioned my acquaintances, one mentioned she often sees individuals in random places who look known. Others at times confuse a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Comprehending the Range of Face Identification Skills

Researchers have developed many tests to quantify the skill to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to identify family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the capacity to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain processes; for instance, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these tests would offer understanding on why unknown people 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 scientists say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I received several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, 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 quite place them – similar to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after analysis of my results, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a series of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but rarely mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Potential Causes

It was theorized that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, assign traits to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and commit faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", 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 closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. Initially, 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 idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

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

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think each countenance is known, and others, like me, who only experience it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding