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During my mid-20s, I observed my grandmother through the window of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the prior year. I stared for a moment, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced similar situations all through my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" an individual I didn't know. Occasionally I could quickly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my grandmother. In other instances, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Range of Person Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I became curious if different individuals have these unusual encounters. When I asked my acquaintances, one said she regularly sees individuals in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others at times mistake a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described no such experiences – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research 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 interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Researchers have designed many tests to measure the skill to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to identify relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain processes; for example, there is proof that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Face Identification Assessments

I felt curious whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a emotion that researchers say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after assessment of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a series of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Potential Explanations

It was suggested that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and commit faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was thought 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 closely at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (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 medical episode such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, 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 liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in many years of research.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think every face is recognizable, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding