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Throughout my mid-20s, I observed my grandmother through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had passed away the year before. I looked intently for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced analogous occurrences during my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" someone I had never met. Sometimes I could quickly determine who the stranger looked like – such as my grandmother. In other instances, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Range of Facial Recognition Capabilities

In recent times, I started wondering if different individuals have these odd experiences. When I inquired my friends, one mentioned she frequently sees persons in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others at times mistake a stranger or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative 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 have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Face Identification Abilities

Investigators have created many assessments to quantify the skill to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to identify relatives, 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 believe I fall short. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the skill to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain functions; for case, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these assessments would shed some light on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often remember people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that researchers say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize 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 black-and-white photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my actual experience.

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

Understanding Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also astonished. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Examining Possible Reasons

It was suggested that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and commit faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify 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 grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the range. 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. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of reported cases all occurred after a physical event such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected HFF in long durations of research.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think each countenance is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding