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During my young adulthood, I observed my grandma through the glass of a café. I felt stunned – she had departed the year before. I stared for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced similar experiences throughout my life. From time to time, I "knew" someone I didn't know. Occasionally I could quickly determine who the stranger reminded me of – like my grandmother. Other times, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Exploring the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

Recently, I became curious if other people have these unusual encounters. When I inquired my companions, one commented she often sees persons in unexpected places who look familiar. Others sometimes mistake a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some reported no such experiences – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds 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 interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Investigators have created many evaluations to measure the skill to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to know family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the skill to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain processes; for instance, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recognize old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Tests

I felt interested whether these tests would offer understanding on why strangers look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that scientists say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify 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 facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. 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 exactly identify them – similar to my actual experience.

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

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a series of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also astonished. I recognized many of the old faces, but rarely confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Plausible Causes

It was theorized that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, assign traits to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and commit faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who resembles 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 Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Examining further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of documented instances all occurred after a health incident such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, 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 liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a continuum, with some people who think all visages is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding