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In my twenties, I noticed my elderly relative through the pane of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the previous year. I gazed for a moment, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered comparable occurrences all through my life. From time to time, I "identified" a person I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could quickly identify who the unknown individual reminded me of – such as my grandma. Other times, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I started wondering if different individuals have these odd encounters. When I inquired my friends, one mentioned she regularly sees persons in unpredictable places who look known. Others occasionally misidentify a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother 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 starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Range of Face Identification Abilities

Investigators have developed many assessments to measure the capacity to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to know kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the skill to recall a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain mechanisms; for instance, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these tests would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a sentiment that experts say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several person 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 three angles, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after analysis of my performance, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a series of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but rarely misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Examining Plausible Causes

It was proposed that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and commit faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely 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.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all happened after a medical episode such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with potential HFF in extended periods of research.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think each countenance is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a few times a month.

{Understanding