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Throughout my young adulthood, I observed my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the previous year. I gazed for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered analogous situations during my life. Periodically, I "recognized" an individual I didn't know. Sometimes I could rapidly identify who the stranger looked like – like my grandmother. Other times, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Variety of Face Identification Abilities

In recent times, I started wondering if others have these odd experiences. When I asked my companions, one mentioned she regularly sees persons in random places who look known. Others occasionally confuse a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some reported no such experiences – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes 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.

Understanding the Continuum of Person Recognition Capacities

Scientists have designed many evaluations to assess the skill to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, 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 have difficulty to identify family, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the skill to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain processes; for example, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt interested whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a feeling that scientists say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after evaluation of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but infrequently confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Possible Explanations

It was proposed that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and retain faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

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

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of reported cases all occurred after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing 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 previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with possible HFF in extended periods of investigation.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think each countenance is recognizable, and others, like me, who only undergo it a few times a month.

{Understanding