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During my twenties, I observed my grandma through the pane of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had passed away the prior year. I looked intently for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had analogous situations during my life. Periodically, I "recognized" an individual I didn't know. At times I could rapidly identify who the unknown individual resembled – like my elderly relative. In other instances, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Spectrum of Person Recognition Experiences

Recently, I started wondering if other people have these odd encounters. When I questioned my acquaintances, one said she regularly sees individuals in unexpected places who look familiar. Others sometimes confuse a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some reported no such experiences – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Understanding the Range of Face Identification Capacities

Investigators have developed many tests to measure the ability to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to know relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain functions; for instance, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Face Identification Assessments

I felt interested whether these assessments would provide insight on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a emotion that experts say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, 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 familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after assessment of my results, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending False Alarm Frequencies

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they review a string of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also surprised. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, 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 stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Plausible Reasons

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, assign traits to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to learn and commit faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

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

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Examining further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of documented instances all happened after a health incident such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

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

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think all visages is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding