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During my young adulthood, I spotted my grandma through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the prior year. I stared for a short time, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced similar experiences all through my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" someone I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could rapidly determine who the unknown individual reminded me of – for instance my elderly relative. On other occasions, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Examining the Range of Person Recognition Experiences

Lately, I began questioning if other people have these unusual situations. When I questioned my friends, one mentioned she often sees persons in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others at times misidentify a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some described nothing of the kind – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Person Recognition Skills

Researchers have developed many tests to assess the skill to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to know relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But scientists "just haven't dug into 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 distinct brain mechanisms; for example, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Assessments

I felt curious whether these assessments would provide insight on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a sentiment that scientists say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled 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 groups. During another test that told me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after evaluation of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also astonished. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Possible Explanations

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and likely near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also likely 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 learn and store faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was thought 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 disposed to notice the stranger who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Over-familiarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all happened after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in many years of research.

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

{Understanding