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Throughout my young adulthood, I spotted my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had departed the previous year. I stared for a moment, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced similar situations throughout my life. Occasionally, I "knew" someone I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could rapidly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person looked like – such as my elderly relative. In other instances, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Variety of Facial Recognition Experiences

Recently, I became curious if other people have these odd encounters. When I asked my acquaintances, one said she frequently sees individuals in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others at times confuse a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds 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.

Grasping the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

Investigators have designed many evaluations to assess the ability to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to identify family, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain mechanisms; for instance, there is proof 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 recognize old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt curious whether these assessments would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a emotion that experts say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, then find it in groups. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after assessment of my performance, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding False Alarm Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a string of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also astonished. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but seldom mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Possible Explanations

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Research suggests that the latter helps people to develop and store faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a considerable notice 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 stranger who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments 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" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all took place after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing 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 person recognition challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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

"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 all visages is recognizable, and others, like me, who only encounter it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding