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In my mid-20s, I observed my grandmother through the window of a café. I felt stunned – she had departed the previous year. I looked intently for a short time, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered analogous occurrences throughout my life. Periodically, I "identified" someone I didn't know. Sometimes I could rapidly identify who the stranger looked like – like my grandma. On other occasions, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Lately, I began questioning if different individuals have these odd encounters. When I inquired my acquaintances, one said she often sees people in random places who look familiar. Others sometimes misidentify a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Person Recognition Abilities

Investigators have designed many assessments to measure the ability to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to identify family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the skill to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use different brain functions; for example, there is proof that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that researchers say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received 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 multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

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

Understanding Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also surprised. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but seldom confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, 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 mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Plausible Causes

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and store faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", 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 unfamiliar individual who resembles my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a syndrome called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of documented instances all occurred after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing 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 facial recognition problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible HFF in extended periods of investigation.

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

{Understanding