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Throughout my mid-20s, I spotted my elderly relative through the glass of a café. I felt astonished – she had passed away the year before. I gazed for a short time, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered analogous occurrences all through my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" an individual I didn't know. Occasionally I could rapidly determine who the stranger looked like – like my grandma. Other times, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capabilities

In recent times, I started wondering if others have these peculiar situations. When I asked my acquaintances, one said she regularly sees people in random places who look recognizable. Others sometimes confuse a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour 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 Range of Facial Recognition Skills

Researchers have developed many evaluations to assess the skill to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side 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 evaluations also measure how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the ability to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use different brain functions; for example, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Tests

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

I was sent several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that directed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

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

Understanding False Alarm Rates

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the old faces, but rarely misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this indicator, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Plausible Causes

It was theorized that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and retain faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity 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 "know" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of reported cases all took place after a physical event such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in long durations of study.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think every face is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a few times a month.

{Understanding