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Throughout my young adulthood, I noticed my elderly relative through the window of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the year before. I looked intently for a short time, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd had similar occurrences all through my life. Periodically, I "identified" a person I didn't know. At times I could rapidly pinpoint who the stranger resembled – for instance my elderly relative. In other instances, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Examining the Spectrum of Face Identification Experiences

Lately, I began questioning if different individuals have these peculiar encounters. When I inquired my friends, one said she often sees persons in unexpected places who look familiar. Others at times misidentify a stranger or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some described no such experiences – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies 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 Range of Person Recognition Skills

Investigators have designed many tests to measure the ability to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to identify family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But researchers "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the skill to recall a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for case, there is proof that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why strangers look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a feeling that scientists say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I received several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from three angles, then find it in groups. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after analysis of my results, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding False Alarm Frequencies

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also surprised. I recalled many of the old faces, but seldom confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Plausible Reasons

It was proposed that I probably possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and commit faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" strangers. Researching further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of reported cases all occurred after a physical event such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with possible HFF in extended periods of research.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think all visages is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a few times a month.

{Understanding