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In my twenties, I noticed my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the prior year. I stared for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced comparable situations during my life. From time to time, I "recognized" a person I had never met. Occasionally I could rapidly identify who the unknown individual resembled – for instance my elderly relative. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Variety of Face Identification Experiences

In recent times, I began questioning if other people have these peculiar situations. When I questioned my companions, one commented she often sees individuals in unpredictable places who look known. Others occasionally mistake a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother 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 beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Person Recognition Skills

Researchers have designed many tests to measure the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to know family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the skill to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain functions; for example, there is indication that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Assessments

I felt curious whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that experts say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after evaluation of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping False Alarm Percentages

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they review a series of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but rarely misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Possible Causes

It was theorized that I likely possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to develop and commit faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who resembles my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of reported cases all took place after a medical episode such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

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

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

{Understanding