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During my mid-20s, I noticed my elderly relative through the pane of a café. I felt stunned – she had died the year before. I looked intently for a brief period, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced analogous situations throughout my life. From time to time, I "recognized" someone I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could rapidly determine who the stranger resembled – such as my grandmother. In other instances, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Lately, I began questioning if other people have these odd situations. When I inquired my friends, one said she often sees people in random places who look recognizable. Others at times mistake a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some described no such experiences – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Person Recognition Capacities

Scientists have designed many assessments to measure the ability to recall faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to identify family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain mechanisms; for instance, there is indication that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Person Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these assessments would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a sentiment that researchers say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I received several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after evaluation of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping False Alarm Rates

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they review a series of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the first set. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also surprised. I remembered many of the old faces, but rarely misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a stranger's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Possible Explanations

It was suggested that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to develop and commit faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all occurred after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a small number 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 every face is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding