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During my mid-20s, I observed my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had died the prior year. I looked intently for a short time, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered analogous situations throughout my life. Occasionally, I "knew" a person I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could quickly identify who the unknown individual looked like – such as my elderly relative. On other occasions, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Investigating the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Experiences

Lately, I started wondering if different individuals have these unusual situations. When I questioned my companions, one mentioned she often sees persons in unpredictable places who look known. Others sometimes misidentify a stranger or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could easily identify 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 approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Facial Recognition Skills

Scientists have developed many evaluations to assess the ability to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to identify relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the skill to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain processes; for example, there is indication that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would shed some light on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that scientists say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, then find it in groups. During another test that told me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after analysis of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a series of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also astonished. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Possible Explanations

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, assign traits to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and commit faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice 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 unknown person who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Researching further, I read about a syndrome called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of reported cases all occurred after a health incident such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in extended periods of study.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a range, with some people who think every face is known, and others, like me, who only encounter it a few times a month.

{Understanding