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Throughout my mid-20s, I noticed my grandma through the glass of a café. I felt stunned – she had died the prior year. I gazed for a brief period, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd had comparable occurrences during my life. Occasionally, I "identified" a person I didn't know. At times I could quickly determine who the stranger resembled – for instance my grandmother. In other instances, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Range of Face Identification Experiences

In recent times, I started wondering if other people have these unusual encounters. When I asked my acquaintances, one said she frequently sees people in unpredictable places who look known. Others occasionally misidentify a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some reported no such experiences – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

Scientists have created many evaluations to measure the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the skill to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain functions; for instance, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Face Identification Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these tests would provide insight on why strangers look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that scientists say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that instructed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after evaluation of my performance, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Rates

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a string of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Plausible Reasons

It was suggested that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, assign traits to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Research suggests that the latter 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 elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all occurred after a health incident such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. 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 small number of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of study.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think all visages is known, and others, like me, who only encounter it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding