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Throughout my young adulthood, I spotted my elderly relative through the pane of a café. I felt astonished – she had departed the year before. I gazed for a brief period, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced similar experiences all through my life. Occasionally, I "knew" an individual I had never met. Occasionally I could quickly determine who the stranger resembled – such as my grandma. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Variety of Facial Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I became curious if others have these odd experiences. When I inquired my acquaintances, one mentioned she frequently sees people in unexpected places who look familiar. Others sometimes mistake a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some reported completely different responses – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? 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 Face Identification Abilities

Investigators have developed many tests to quantify the capacity to recall faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to identify kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain functions; for instance, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Tests

I felt intrigued whether these tests would offer understanding on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a emotion that experts say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, then find it in arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after evaluation of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding False Alarm Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also surprised. I recognized many of the old faces, but rarely misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Potential Explanations

It was theorized that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, assign traits to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and retain faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Researching further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of reported cases all occurred after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

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

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a range, with some people who think every face is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a few times a month.

{Understanding