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During my twenties, I observed my elderly relative through the window of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the previous year. I stared for a moment, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd had analogous occurrences during my life. From time to time, I "recognized" a person I didn't know. Sometimes I could quickly identify who the stranger resembled – like my elderly relative. Other times, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Examining the Range of Person Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I became curious if different individuals have these unusual encounters. When I questioned my friends, one mentioned she frequently sees people in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others sometimes misidentify a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some described nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

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

Comprehending the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Scientists have designed many assessments to assess the skill to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to know relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the skill to recall a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain processes; for example, there is indication that super-recognizers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that experts say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several face identification 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 told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after assessment of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping False Alarm Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they review a series of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also surprised. I remembered many of the old faces, but rarely misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Plausible Explanations

It was suggested that I probably possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Research suggests that the latter helps people to learn and store faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who resembles my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance 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 tests 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 hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all happened after a medical episode such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new 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 occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a continuum, with some people who think each countenance is familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding