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Throughout my young adulthood, I spotted my grandmother through the glass of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the year before. I stared for a moment, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered analogous experiences all through my life. From time to time, I "identified" a person I didn't know. At times I could promptly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – for instance my elderly relative. Other times, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Spectrum of Person Recognition Experiences

Recently, I became curious if different individuals have these peculiar encounters. When I inquired my acquaintances, one mentioned she regularly sees people in random places who look familiar. Others occasionally confuse a stranger or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some reported completely different responses – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Facial Recognition Skills

Researchers have designed many evaluations to measure the skill to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use different brain functions; for instance, there is evidence that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Face Identification Evaluations

I felt curious whether these evaluations would shed some light on why strangers look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that scientists say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, 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 familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after evaluation of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but infrequently mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Potential Explanations

It was proposed that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and likely near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to learn and store faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all happened after a health incident such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

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

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a range, with some people who think each countenance is known, and others, like me, who only encounter it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding