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Throughout my young adulthood, I spotted my elderly relative through the pane 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 be her.

I'd had analogous experiences during my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" an individual I didn't know. At times I could promptly identify who the unfamiliar person resembled – for instance my grandma. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Range of Person Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I started wondering if others have these odd situations. When I asked my acquaintances, one commented she frequently sees individuals in random places who look known. Others at times mistake a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some reported completely different responses – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Comprehending the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Investigators have created many tests to measure the ability to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to recognize relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. 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 distinct brain mechanisms; for case, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that scientists say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after assessment of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending False Alarm Percentages

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also surprised. I recalled many of the old faces, but infrequently misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Potential Causes

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and store faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of reported cases all occurred after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with suspected HFF in many years of research.

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

{Understanding