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In my mid-20s, I observed my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had passed away the previous year. I looked intently for a moment, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had comparable occurrences all through my life. From time to time, I "knew" someone I didn't know. Occasionally I could quickly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my grandma. In other instances, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

Recently, I started wondering if other people have these unusual situations. When I questioned my friends, one said she often sees individuals in random places who look familiar. Others at times confuse a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported no such experiences – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Person Recognition Skills

Investigators have developed many evaluations to quantify the capacity to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to identify kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the skill to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain functions; for instance, there is proof that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt curious whether these assessments would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that experts say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, 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 public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after evaluation of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they review a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also surprised. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but rarely confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Possible Causes

It was theorized that I likely possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Research suggests that the latter helps people to develop and commit faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of documented instances all occurred after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, 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 old/new faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected HFF in long durations of investigation.

"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 every face is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a few times a month.

{Understanding