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In my mid-20s, I observed my elderly relative through the window of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had passed away the previous year. I gazed for a moment, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered comparable experiences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "identified" a person I had never met. At times I could promptly determine who the unknown individual looked like – such as my grandmother. Other times, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Investigating the Variety of Person Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I became curious if different individuals have these odd experiences. When I questioned my friends, one mentioned she frequently sees individuals in unpredictable places who look known. Others sometimes misidentify a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some described completely different responses – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research 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 interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Person Recognition Capacities

Researchers have developed many tests to assess the capacity to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to identify family, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. But researchers "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain functions; for case, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these tests would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a feeling that researchers say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, 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 – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after analysis of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a series of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the old faces, but infrequently confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a stranger's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Potential Reasons

It was proposed that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and commit faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice 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 prone to notice the stranger who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of reported cases all happened after a physical event such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with possible HFF in many years of investigation.

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

{Understanding