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Throughout my young adulthood, I observed my grandmother through the window of a café. I felt stunned – she had departed the year before. I looked intently for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered analogous situations throughout my life. Periodically, I "knew" someone I didn't know. Sometimes I could promptly determine who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – like my grandmother. In other instances, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Variety of Face Identification Experiences

In recent times, I began questioning if others have these peculiar situations. When I asked my acquaintances, one commented she often sees people in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others occasionally confuse a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described completely different responses – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capacities

Scientists have designed many evaluations to quantify the capacity to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to identify kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the ability to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain processes; for case, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these tests would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that experts say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent 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 black-and-white photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that directed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my actual experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after evaluation of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping False Alarm Rates

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they review a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the initial group. 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 facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the old faces, but seldom confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers 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 grandma's?

Investigating Plausible Reasons

It was proposed that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and retain faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention 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 prone to notice the stranger who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all happened after a health incident such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing 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 person recognition difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected HFF in many years of investigation.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a range, with some people who think each countenance is familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a few times a month.

{Understanding