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During my mid-20s, I spotted my grandmother through the glass of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had died the previous year. I looked intently for a brief period, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced analogous experiences throughout my life. Periodically, I "identified" a person I had never met. Sometimes I could quickly pinpoint who the unknown individual reminded me of – like my grandma. In other instances, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I began questioning if others have these unusual experiences. When I questioned my acquaintances, one said she regularly sees persons in random places who look recognizable. Others sometimes mistake a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Person Recognition Abilities

Scientists have developed many assessments to quantify the skill to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to know kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain mechanisms; for instance, there is proof that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt curious whether these assessments would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that experts say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, 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 known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after analysis of my results, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also surprised. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Examining Potential Explanations

It was proposed that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to learn and commit faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of documented instances all occurred after a health incident such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected HFF in many years of study.

"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 known, and others, like me, who only encounter it a few times a month.

{Understanding