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Throughout my young adulthood, I noticed my grandma through the window of a café. I felt astonished – she had died the year before. I stared for a short time, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had analogous occurrences all through my life. Occasionally, I "knew" someone I had never met. Occasionally I could quickly determine who the unknown individual reminded me of – such as my elderly relative. In other instances, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Investigating the Spectrum of Face Identification Experiences

Recently, I began questioning if other people have these odd experiences. When I questioned my friends, one said she often sees individuals in unexpected places who look familiar. Others sometimes misidentify a stranger or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described nothing of the kind – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research 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.

Comprehending the Continuum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Researchers have developed many assessments to quantify the ability to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to know relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the skill to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain functions; for case, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Tests

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a sentiment that researchers say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree 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 multiple perspectives, then find it in lineups. 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 quite place them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after evaluation of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping False Alarm Rates

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a series of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Examining Plausible Explanations

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and commit faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention 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 stranger who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Researching further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of reported cases all happened after a physical event such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification challenges, 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 memory for faces evaluation.

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

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think all visages is familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding