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Throughout my mid-20s, I noticed my elderly relative through the glass of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the prior year. I looked intently for a short time, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd had analogous situations all through my life. From time to time, I "knew" a person I didn't know. At times I could rapidly pinpoint who the stranger resembled – for instance my grandmother. In other instances, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Examining the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Recently, I became curious if other people have these peculiar situations. When I questioned my friends, one mentioned she often sees people in unexpected places who look familiar. Others sometimes mistake a stranger or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some described no such experiences – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma 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 err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Person Recognition Abilities

Researchers have developed many evaluations to quantify the skill to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to recognize kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the ability to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain processes; for instance, there is indication that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that scientists say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several person recognition tests. I waded 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 arrays. 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 precisely recognize them – similar to my actual experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after evaluation of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a series of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the first set. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also surprised. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but infrequently misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Possible Reasons

It was suggested that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to learn and store faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus 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 prone to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition 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 "identify" unknown people. 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 apply to me. But the small number of reported cases all occurred after a health incident such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances 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 frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think each countenance is known, and others, like me, who only experience it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding