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During my young adulthood, I spotted my elderly relative through the window of a café. I felt astonished – she had departed the previous year. I stared for a short time, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had comparable occurrences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "knew" someone I didn't know. Occasionally I could rapidly determine who the unfamiliar person resembled – for instance my elderly relative. In other instances, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Examining the Range of Face Identification Abilities

In recent times, I started wondering if different individuals have these odd experiences. When I questioned my friends, one commented she often sees persons in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others at times misidentify a unknown person or public figure 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 intrigued by this range of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Range of Face Identification Capacities

Researchers have created many evaluations to quantify the skill to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to recognize relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain processes; for instance, there is proof that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Person Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these tests 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 disappointed – a emotion that experts say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several person recognition 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 multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after assessment of my performance, I had accurately recognized 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding False Alarm Rates

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also surprised. I remembered many of the old faces, but infrequently misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Potential Explanations

It was proposed that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to develop and store faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations 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. Investigating further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of documented instances all happened after a health incident such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in extended periods of study.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think each countenance is recognizable, and others, like me, who only undergo it a few times a month.

{Understanding