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Throughout my twenties, I spotted my grandma through the pane of a café. I felt stunned – she had departed the year before. I stared for a short time, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced similar situations during my life. Periodically, I "knew" someone I had never met. Occasionally I could promptly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person looked like – such as my grandmother. On other occasions, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Examining the Variety of Person Recognition Experiences

Lately, I became curious if others have these unusual encounters. When I inquired my friends, one said she frequently sees individuals in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others sometimes misidentify a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some described no such experiences – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Skills

Scientists have created many assessments to measure the skill to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to identify relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

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

Completing Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a emotion that researchers say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several face identification tests. I worked 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 three angles, then find it in groups. During another test that directed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after assessment of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also surprised. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but infrequently mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Possible Reasons

It was proposed that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Research suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and retain faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", 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 resembles my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations 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" strangers. Examining further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all took place after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible HFF in long durations of study.

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

{Understanding