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Throughout my young adulthood, I noticed my elderly relative through the window of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had passed away the previous year. I stared for a brief period, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had similar situations during my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" an individual I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could rapidly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – like my grandma. Other times, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Variety of Facial Recognition Abilities

Recently, I began questioning if different individuals have these odd situations. When I questioned my friends, one commented she often sees persons in random places who look known. Others sometimes misidentify a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some reported no such experiences – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma 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 have inaccuracies sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Scientists have designed many tests to measure the ability to remember 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 facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to identify relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the ability to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain functions; for instance, there is proof that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Tests

I felt curious whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that scientists say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several person recognition 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 different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that instructed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after assessment of my results, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending False Alarm Rates

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also surprised. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Potential Causes

It was suggested that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to learn and store faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

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 recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged 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 continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all took place after a medical episode such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, 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 Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in long durations of research.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think each countenance is known, and others, like me, who only encounter it a few times a month.

{Understanding