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Throughout my young adulthood, I spotted my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had died the year before. I looked intently for a short time, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced analogous experiences throughout my life. From time to time, I "recognized" a person I didn't know. Sometimes I could promptly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person resembled – like my grandma. On other occasions, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Variety of Person Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I began questioning if other people have these unusual situations. When I questioned my friends, one commented she regularly sees individuals in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others at times mistake a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some described nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds 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 perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Face Identification Abilities

Scientists have designed many evaluations to quantify the skill to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to identify relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments 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 scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the ability to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for instance, there is proof 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.

Undergoing Face Identification Assessments

I felt curious whether these assessments would provide insight on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that researchers say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from three angles, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after analysis of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Rates

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a series of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also surprised. I remembered many of the old faces, but infrequently confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Possible Reasons

It was theorized that I probably possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and retain faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", 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 carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" strangers. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of documented instances all took place after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with possible HFF in many years 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 each countenance is recognizable, and others, like me, who only encounter it a few times a month.

{Understanding