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Throughout my twenties, I observed my grandmother through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had departed the previous year. I looked intently for a moment, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd had analogous situations during my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" a person I didn't know. Sometimes I could rapidly identify who the unknown individual reminded me of – like my elderly relative. In other instances, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

Recently, I started wondering if different individuals have these peculiar situations. When I inquired my companions, one commented she regularly sees persons in random places who look familiar. Others at times confuse a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some described no such experiences – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research 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 experience the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Scientists have developed many assessments to assess the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to know kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain processes; for case, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt interested whether these assessments would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a emotion that scientists say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my real-life experience.

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

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a series of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also surprised. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but infrequently confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Possible Reasons

It was theorized that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the later element helps people to learn and store faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of reported cases all happened after a medical episode such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

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

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in long durations of investigation.

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

{Understanding