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Throughout my young adulthood, I observed my grandma through the window of a café. I felt astonished – she had died the year before. I stared for a short time, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered similar occurrences all through my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" a person I didn't know. At times I could rapidly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person resembled – like my grandma. Other times, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Recently, I started wondering if different individuals have these odd situations. When I inquired my friends, one mentioned she regularly sees people in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others occasionally mistake a stranger or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some reported completely different responses – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother 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 err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Investigators have developed many tests to measure the ability to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to know family, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the skill to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain mechanisms; for case, there is proof that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Tests

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would provide insight on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that scientists say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I received several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after analysis of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Rates

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a series of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also astonished. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but infrequently confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this indicator, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a stranger's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Potential Explanations

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, assign traits to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to learn and commit faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all happened after a medical episode such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with possible HFF in many years of study.

"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 every face is recognizable, and others, like me, who only experience it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding