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Throughout my young adulthood, I spotted my grandma through the window of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had departed the prior year. I gazed for a moment, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd had comparable situations during my life. From time to time, I "knew" an individual I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could quickly pinpoint who the unknown individual reminded me of – such as my grandma. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Examining the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I became curious if other people have these peculiar situations. When I inquired my friends, one commented she often sees individuals in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others at times confuse a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes 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.

Comprehending the Range of Facial Recognition Capacities

Investigators have designed many assessments to assess the skill to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to identify relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think 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 separate brain processes; for instance, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that scientists say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I received several person recognition tests. I waded 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 different viewpoints, 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 – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after evaluation of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a series of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but seldom misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Possible Reasons

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to develop and store faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, 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 prone to notice the stranger who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition 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 "know" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of reported cases all occurred after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with potential HFF in long durations of study.

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

{Understanding