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Throughout my young adulthood, I noticed my grandmother through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had died the prior year. I looked intently for a short time, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced similar situations throughout my life. Occasionally, I "knew" an individual I didn't know. Occasionally I could promptly identify who the unknown individual resembled – for instance my grandmother. Other times, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Examining the Variety of Person Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I began questioning if others have these unusual situations. When I questioned my acquaintances, one mentioned she frequently sees persons in unpredictable places who look known. Others sometimes misidentify a stranger or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother 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 commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Facial Recognition Skills

Investigators have created many assessments to assess the skill to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to recognize kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined 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 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.

Undergoing Person Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these tests would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that experts say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, 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 recognizable, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my everyday experience.

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

Grasping Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a sequence of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also astonished. I remembered many of the old faces, but infrequently misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Potential Explanations

It was theorized that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and commit faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was believed 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 disposed to notice the stranger who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" strangers. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all took place after a physical event such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in many years of research.

"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 each countenance is recognizable, and others, like me, who only encounter it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding