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Throughout my young adulthood, I noticed my elderly relative through the glass of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the year before. I gazed for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered comparable occurrences all through my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" someone I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could rapidly pinpoint who the stranger resembled – for instance my grandma. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Variety of Face Identification Experiences

Recently, I became curious if different individuals have these peculiar situations. When I asked my acquaintances, one mentioned she frequently sees persons in unexpected places who look known. Others sometimes mistake a unknown person or public figure 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 intrigued by this diversity of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Scientific investigation has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds 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 experience the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Person Recognition Capacities

Researchers have created many tests to measure the capacity to recall faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to know kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the skill to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain functions; for example, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these tests would provide insight on why strangers look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that experts say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't quite place them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after evaluation of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a string of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also surprised. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Plausible Explanations

It was theorized that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Research suggests that the latter helps people to learn and commit faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice 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 unfamiliar individual who looks like 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.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments 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" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all occurred after a physical event such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing 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 difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with suspected HFF in many years of research.

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

{Understanding