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Throughout my twenties, I noticed my grandma through the pane of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the prior year. I stared for a short time, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced comparable situations throughout my life. Periodically, I "knew" an individual I had never met. Occasionally I could promptly identify who the stranger reminded me of – such as my grandmother. Other times, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Examining the Variety of Facial Recognition Abilities

Lately, I started wondering if others have these peculiar encounters. When I inquired my friends, one mentioned she frequently sees individuals in unexpected places who look known. Others sometimes confuse a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some reported completely different responses – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma 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 experience the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Investigators have created many evaluations to quantify the ability to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to know relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the skill to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain functions; for instance, there is evidence 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 intrigued whether these assessments would offer understanding on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that researchers say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after analysis of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding False Alarm Rates

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also astonished. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but seldom misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Potential Reasons

It was suggested that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, assign traits to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to develop and retain faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma 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 carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who resembles my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" strangers. Researching further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of reported cases all took place after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been observing 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 difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible HFF in many years of research.

"The frequency 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 recognizable, and others, like me, who only experience it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding