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Throughout my mid-20s, I noticed my grandma through the pane of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had passed away the previous year. I stared for a short time, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd had comparable occurrences all through my life. From time to time, I "knew" a person I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could quickly determine who the unknown individual resembled – for instance my grandma. In other instances, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Investigating the Variety of Person Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I started wondering if different individuals have these peculiar situations. When I inquired my acquaintances, one said she often sees persons in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others sometimes mistake a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some described completely different responses – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes 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 interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Researchers have developed many evaluations to measure the capacity to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to identify relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the ability to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use different brain mechanisms; for case, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these evaluations would shed some light on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that researchers say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after analysis of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending False Alarm Rates

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also surprised. I recalled many of the old faces, but infrequently mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Possible Explanations

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and commit faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition 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 continuum. 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 excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of reported cases all occurred after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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

"The frequency 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 recognizable, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding