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In my mid-20s, I spotted my elderly relative through the glass of a café. I felt stunned – she had departed the prior year. I stared for a brief period, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd had similar situations during my life. Periodically, I "identified" an individual I had never met. At times I could rapidly determine who the unknown individual reminded me of – for instance my grandmother. In other instances, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Examining the Variety of Person Recognition Abilities

Lately, I became curious if others have these peculiar encounters. When I questioned my acquaintances, one said she regularly sees persons in random places who look familiar. Others at times mistake a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies 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 interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Person Recognition Capacities

Investigators have created many tests to measure the ability to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize family, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how proficient someone is at telling 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 looked at the capacity to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain processes; for case, there is evidence that super-recognizers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Face Identification Tests

I felt curious whether these assessments would offer understanding on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a sentiment that researchers say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale 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 recognizable, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after analysis of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Rates

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a series of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also surprised. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Possible Causes

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to develop and store faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", 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 carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of reported cases all took place after a health incident such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. 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 possible HFF in extended periods of study.

"The occurrence rate 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 familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a few times a month.

{Understanding