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In my twenties, I spotted my grandma through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the prior year. I gazed for a short time, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced analogous experiences all through my life. Periodically, I "identified" someone I had never met. Occasionally I could rapidly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – for instance my elderly relative. Other times, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Examining the Range of Facial Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I became curious if different individuals have these peculiar situations. When I inquired my acquaintances, one said she frequently sees people in unexpected places who look familiar. Others occasionally misidentify a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some described completely different responses – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds 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.

Comprehending the Range of Person Recognition Skills

Researchers have developed many tests to quantify 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 considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to recognize family, close friends 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 suspect I have limitations. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the ability to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain functions; for instance, there is evidence that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unknown people 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 experts say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled 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 groups. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after analysis of my results, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion 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 especially effective for assessing someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a series of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also astonished. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Potential Reasons

It was suggested that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to learn and store faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, 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 looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" strangers. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all happened after a health incident such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, 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 Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible HFF in extended periods of study.

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

{Understanding