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Throughout my twenties, I observed my elderly relative through the window of a café. I felt stunned – she had departed the previous year. I looked intently for a moment, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered comparable situations all through my life. From time to time, I "recognized" someone I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could promptly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – like my grandmother. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Variety of Facial Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I became curious if different individuals have these odd encounters. When I questioned my companions, one commented she regularly sees persons in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others at times mistake a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour 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 perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Range of Face Identification Abilities

Researchers have developed many evaluations to measure the capacity to recognize 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 facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the ability to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain functions; for instance, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Evaluations

I felt interested whether these assessments would shed some light on why strangers look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that experts say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in lineups. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after assessment of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping False Alarm Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a string of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also surprised. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but seldom misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Potential Reasons

It was suggested that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and store 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 comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who resembles 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 Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I sat on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of documented instances all occurred after a medical episode such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with potential HFF in many years of investigation.

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

{Understanding