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During my mid-20s, I spotted my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had died the prior year. I stared for a brief period, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered analogous situations during my life. Occasionally, I "knew" someone I had never met. Sometimes I could quickly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – like my grandma. On other occasions, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Investigating the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I started wondering if others have these peculiar experiences. When I inquired my friends, one mentioned she regularly sees persons in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others sometimes misidentify a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some described nothing of the kind – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of perceptions. 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 make mistakes sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Face Identification Skills

Investigators have designed many evaluations to measure the capacity to recall faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to recognize relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use different brain mechanisms; for example, there is proof that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that scientists say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after assessment of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding False Alarm Rates

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a string of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also astonished. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, 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 elderly relative's?

Examining Possible Causes

It was proposed that I probably possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and retain faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", 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 carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all took place after a health incident such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

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

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a range, with some people who think every face is recognizable, and others, like me, who only encounter it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding