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In my mid-20s, I observed my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had departed the prior year. I stared for a moment, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered similar experiences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "knew" someone I was unacquainted with. At times I could quickly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my grandma. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Spectrum of Person Recognition Experiences

Lately, I became curious if others have these unusual encounters. When I questioned my friends, one commented she frequently sees individuals in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others at times misidentify a stranger or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some described no such experiences – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Investigators have designed many evaluations to quantify the capacity to recall 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 prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to know relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the skill to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain functions; for instance, there is indication that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Face Identification Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these tests would provide insight on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that scientists say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that instructed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – comparable to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after analysis of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they review a string of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also surprised. I recalled many of the old faces, but infrequently mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Potential Causes

It was theorized that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and store faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all occurred after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, 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 liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in long durations 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 known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding