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During my twenties, I spotted my grandma through the window of a café. I felt stunned – she had passed away the year before. I stared for a brief period, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced similar experiences all through my life. Periodically, I "knew" someone I had never met. Occasionally I could promptly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – such as my grandma. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Examining the Variety of Facial Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I started wondering if other people have these peculiar situations. When I questioned my acquaintances, one commented she regularly sees individuals in unexpected places who look known. Others at times confuse a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Facial Recognition Skills

Investigators have developed many evaluations to measure the skill to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to know relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the ability to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain functions; for instance, there is proof that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Face Identification Assessments

I felt interested whether these assessments would offer understanding on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that experts say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, 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 familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after evaluation of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they review a series of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also surprised. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Plausible Explanations

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and commit faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was thought 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 inclined to notice the stranger who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of documented instances all occurred after a health incident such as a seizure 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 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

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

"The prevalence 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 recognizable, and others, like me, who only undergo it a few times a month.

{Understanding