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In my twenties, I observed my grandmother through the window of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the previous year. I gazed for a moment, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered comparable experiences during my life. Periodically, I "identified" a person I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could promptly identify who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – like my elderly relative. Other times, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I began questioning if different individuals have these peculiar experiences. When I asked my friends, one mentioned she regularly sees individuals in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others occasionally confuse a unknown person or public figure 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 intrigued by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Person Recognition Abilities

Scientists have developed many assessments to assess the skill to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to know family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain processes; for case, there is proof that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Face Identification Tests

I felt interested whether these assessments would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a sentiment that researchers say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I received several face identification tests. I worked 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 directed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after analysis of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping False Alarm Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they review a string of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also astonished. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Possible Explanations

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Research suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and store faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

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 recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of reported cases all took place after a medical episode such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

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

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

{Understanding