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Throughout my mid-20s, I observed my elderly relative through the pane of a café. I felt stunned – she had departed the year before. I gazed for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced analogous experiences throughout my life. From time to time, I "knew" an individual I had never met. At times I could promptly pinpoint who the unknown individual resembled – such as my grandmother. On other occasions, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Lately, I started wondering if different individuals have these unusual situations. When I questioned my companions, one commented she often sees persons in random places who look familiar. Others at times misidentify a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes 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 perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Face Identification Skills

Investigators have designed many evaluations to measure the skill to recall faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to identify kin, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how good someone is at determining 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 studied the ability to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain functions; for instance, there is evidence that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Person Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these evaluations would shed some light on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a feeling that experts say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I received several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after analysis of my performance, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending False Alarm Percentages

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a series of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also astonished. I recognized many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Plausible Reasons

It was suggested that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Research suggests that the later element helps people to learn and retain faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", 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 closely at faces, I am inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining 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 "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of reported cases all took place after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible 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 range, with some people who think every face is known, and others, like me, who only experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding