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Throughout my mid-20s, I observed my grandma through the glass of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the previous year. I stared for a moment, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced comparable situations throughout my life. From time to time, I "knew" a person I didn't know. Occasionally I could rapidly identify who the stranger looked like – such as my elderly relative. On other occasions, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Investigating the Variety of Facial Recognition Abilities

Recently, I began questioning if different individuals have these odd experiences. When I questioned my companions, one commented she often sees persons in unexpected places who look known. Others sometimes mistake a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some described completely different responses – they could effortlessly recognize 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 grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Facial Recognition Skills

Investigators have designed many assessments to quantify the skill to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to recognize kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the skill to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain processes; for instance, there is proof that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt curious whether these tests would offer understanding on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often remember people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that experts say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from three angles, then find it in lineups. During another test that told 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 – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after analysis of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, 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 metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers 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 Causes

It was suggested that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and store faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who resembles my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" strangers. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all occurred after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, 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 memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in long durations of research.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think all visages is known, and others, like me, who only encounter it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding