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Throughout my young adulthood, I noticed my elderly relative through the window of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had died the year before. I looked intently for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced similar occurrences throughout my life. Periodically, I "recognized" someone I had never met. Sometimes I could promptly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – for instance my grandma. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Examining the Variety of Person Recognition Experiences

Lately, I started wondering if different individuals have these peculiar encounters. When I questioned my companions, one mentioned she regularly sees individuals in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others sometimes misidentify a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some described no such experiences – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Person Recognition Skills

Scientists have created many assessments to assess the ability to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to know kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recall a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain processes; for case, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt curious whether these tests would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that experts say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. 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 precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after evaluation of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for assessing 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 string of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also surprised. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but rarely confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Examining Potential Reasons

It was suggested that I likely possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and commit faces to enduring recollection. 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 moreover, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person 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.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity 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 "know" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could relate 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 observing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, 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 handful of people with suspected HFF in many years of research.

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

{Understanding