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During my twenties, I noticed my elderly relative through the pane of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the prior year. I looked intently for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered analogous experiences during my life. Occasionally, I "identified" a person I didn't know. Occasionally I could promptly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person resembled – for instance my grandma. In other instances, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Investigating the Variety of Person Recognition Experiences

Lately, I started wondering if different individuals have these odd experiences. When I questioned my acquaintances, one said she regularly sees persons in random places who look familiar. Others sometimes confuse a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some described nothing of the kind – they could easily identify 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 grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour 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.

Grasping the Continuum of Face Identification Abilities

Investigators have designed many assessments to measure the ability to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to know relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how proficient someone is at determining 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 capacity to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain processes; for instance, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would offer understanding on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that scientists say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, 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 known, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my actual experience.

I felt doubtful about my outcome. But after analysis of my performance, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping False Alarm Frequencies

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also surprised. I recognized many of the old faces, but infrequently confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Possible Explanations

It was theorized that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and commit faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification 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 similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating 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 "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a condition 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 recorded occurrences all happened after a medical episode such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, 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 liquefying. 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 few 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 familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding