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During my young adulthood, I noticed my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the previous year. I stared for a short time, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced similar situations throughout my life. Periodically, I "recognized" an individual I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could promptly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person looked like – like my elderly relative. On other occasions, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Examining the Variety of Facial Recognition Abilities

Lately, I became curious if others have these unusual experiences. When I asked my companions, one mentioned she frequently sees individuals in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others occasionally mistake a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could easily distinguish 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 grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies 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 Capacities

Investigators have created many assessments to measure the capacity to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to identify kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain mechanisms; for example, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Face Identification Tests

I felt curious whether these evaluations would provide insight on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that scientists say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from three angles, then find it in groups. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after evaluation of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping False Alarm Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the old faces, but infrequently misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Plausible Explanations

It was theorized that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to develop and retain 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 similar air.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of reported cases all occurred after a physical event such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of investigation.

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

{Understanding