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Throughout my young adulthood, I observed my elderly relative through the window of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had died the previous year. I gazed for a brief period, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered analogous occurrences during my life. From time to time, I "recognized" a person I was unacquainted with. At times I could quickly identify who the stranger resembled – like my elderly relative. Other times, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Investigating the Range of Face Identification Capabilities

Lately, I started wondering if different individuals have these odd experiences. When I questioned my companions, one commented she frequently sees persons in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others occasionally mistake a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some reported no such experiences – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of responses. Was it just desire 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 err sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Range of Face Identification Skills

Researchers have developed many evaluations to measure the skill to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the ability to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain mechanisms; for case, 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 recognize old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt curious whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a emotion that researchers say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from three angles, then find it in groups. During another test that directed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after evaluation of my performance, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a string of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also astonished. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but infrequently misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers 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 Possible Causes

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution 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 later element helps people to acquire and retain faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all took place after a health incident such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a continuum, with some people who think every face is recognizable, and others, like me, who only encounter it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding