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Throughout my twenties, I noticed my elderly relative through the pane of a café. I felt stunned – she had departed the previous year. I gazed for a brief period, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd had similar occurrences during my life. From time to time, I "recognized" a person I didn't know. Occasionally I could quickly determine who the unknown individual resembled – such as my grandma. Other times, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Investigating the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I became curious if different individuals have these unusual situations. When I inquired my friends, one commented she regularly sees persons in unexpected places who look familiar. Others sometimes mistake a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Person Recognition Capacities

Researchers have designed many assessments to quantify the skill to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: 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 facial agnosia, who often struggle to know relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the ability to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain processes; for case, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Evaluations

I felt curious whether these tests would shed some light on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that experts say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from three angles, then find it in arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after evaluation of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding False Alarm Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia 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 misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Potential Causes

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and commit faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify 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 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.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of reported cases all occurred after a medical episode such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the facial recall assessment.

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

"The prevalence 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 known, and others, like me, who only encounter it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding