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In my twenties, I spotted my grandma through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had departed the previous year. I looked intently for a short time, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced analogous occurrences during my life. Occasionally, I "identified" someone I had never met. Occasionally I could promptly identify who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – like my grandma. Other times, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Recently, I became curious if other people have these peculiar experiences. When I questioned my companions, one mentioned she regularly sees persons in random places who look known. Others occasionally mistake a stranger or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies 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.

Grasping the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

Investigators have designed many assessments to measure the skill to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to identify kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the ability to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain functions; for case, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Tests

I felt interested whether these assessments would provide insight on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that researchers say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after evaluation of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a series of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also surprised. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but rarely mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Potential Reasons

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to learn and commit faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of documented instances all happened after a health incident such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with suspected HFF in many years of study.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think all visages is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding