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During my twenties, I noticed my grandma through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had departed the year before. I stared for a short time, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had similar situations throughout my life. Occasionally, I "knew" an individual I had never met. Sometimes I could rapidly determine who the unfamiliar person resembled – like my grandmother. Other times, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Exploring the Variety of Facial Recognition Experiences

Recently, I started wondering if other people have these unusual experiences. When I questioned my friends, one commented she frequently sees persons in unpredictable places who look known. Others sometimes confuse a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some reported completely different responses – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Scientific investigation has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Person Recognition Skills

Investigators have designed many assessments to measure the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to identify family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the ability to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use different brain mechanisms; for instance, 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 wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Taking Face Identification Assessments

I felt curious whether these tests would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that experts say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, then find it in lineups. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after analysis of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending False Alarm Frequencies

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a series of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also astonished. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers 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 elderly relative's?

Examining Possible Explanations

It was proposed that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to develop and store faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more false alarm 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 similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of reported cases all occurred after a medical episode such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

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

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

{Understanding