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During my twenties, I spotted my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the year before. I stared for a short time, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced comparable experiences all through my life. Periodically, I "recognized" an individual I was unacquainted with. At times I could quickly determine who the unknown individual looked like – like my grandmother. On other occasions, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Spectrum of Face Identification Capabilities

In recent times, I became curious if other people have these odd situations. When I asked my friends, one said she often sees people in random places who look familiar. Others at times mistake a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative 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 make mistakes sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Skills

Researchers have created many tests to measure the skill to recall faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to know relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the skill to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain mechanisms; for example, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt curious whether these assessments would shed some light on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often remember people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that scientists say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling confused 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 arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my everyday experience.

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

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also surprised. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result 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 grandmother's?

Investigating Possible Causes

It was theorized that I likely possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, assign traits to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and retain faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus 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 unfamiliar individual who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all took place after a health incident such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected HFF in many years of investigation.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think every face is familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding