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Throughout my young adulthood, I observed my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the prior year. I gazed for a short time, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had comparable situations all through my life. From time to time, I "recognized" an individual I had never met. Sometimes I could promptly identify who the stranger looked like – for instance my elderly relative. On other occasions, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Exploring the Range of Person Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I became curious if different individuals have these peculiar experiences. When I inquired my acquaintances, one commented she often sees people in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others sometimes mistake a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some described nothing of the kind – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? 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.

Comprehending the Continuum of Facial Recognition Skills

Researchers have designed many evaluations to assess the ability to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to know family, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the ability to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain mechanisms; for case, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt curious whether these tests would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a emotion that experts say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from multiple perspectives, 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 precisely recognize them – similar to my actual experience.

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

Comprehending False Alarm Percentages

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also surprised. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Potential Explanations

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Research suggests that the later element helps people to learn and retain faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", 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 inclined to notice the stranger who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I sat on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" strangers. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of documented instances all took place after a medical episode such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. 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 handful of people with potential HFF in long durations of research.

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

{Understanding