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During my twenties, I observed my elderly relative through the glass of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the year before. I stared for a short time, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced similar occurrences throughout my life. From time to time, I "recognized" a person I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could rapidly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – for instance my grandmother. In other instances, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Variety of Facial Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I began questioning if other people have these odd encounters. When I asked my friends, one mentioned she frequently sees persons in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others sometimes misidentify a stranger or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some described nothing of the kind – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma 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 Continuum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Scientists have developed many assessments to measure the ability to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to identify kin, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe 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 cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain mechanisms; for case, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Taking Face Identification Tests

I felt curious whether these assessments would shed some light on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often remember people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that researchers say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several facial recognition tests. I worked through 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 lineups. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my actual experience.

I felt doubtful about my outcome. But after evaluation of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping False Alarm Frequencies

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the old faces, but seldom confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, 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 mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Potential Causes

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to learn and store faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice 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 inclined to notice the unknown person who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition 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 "know" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of reported cases all took place after a health incident such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with suspected HFF in long durations of investigation.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think every face is recognizable, and others, like me, who only encounter it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding