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In my twenties, I observed my grandma through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the prior year. I stared for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered similar occurrences all through my life. From time to time, I "recognized" an individual I had never met. Occasionally I could rapidly identify who the stranger looked like – such as my elderly relative. Other times, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Recently, I became curious if other people have these peculiar experiences. When I inquired my acquaintances, one commented she often sees individuals in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others sometimes misidentify a stranger or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Scientific investigation 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 experience the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Investigators have created many assessments to assess the ability to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to recognize family, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the capacity to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for example, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these assessments would shed some light on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that scientists say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, 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 known, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after assessment of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they review a string of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also astonished. I recognized many of the old faces, but rarely misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Plausible Reasons

It was proposed that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Research suggests that the later element helps people to learn and retain faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all happened after a medical episode such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. 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 suspected HFF in long durations of research.

"The frequency 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 recognizable, and others, like me, who only undergo it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding