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In my twenties, I spotted my grandma through the pane of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the year before. I stared for a short time, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered comparable occurrences during my life. From time to time, I "identified" an individual I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could promptly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – for instance my elderly relative. In other instances, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Exploring the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I became curious if different individuals have these peculiar experiences. When I asked my friends, one commented she often sees individuals in random places who look known. Others at times confuse a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some reported no such experiences – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of responses. Was it just desire 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 commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Face Identification Skills

Investigators have designed many assessments to assess the skill to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to identify family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how good someone is at telling 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 examined the capacity to recall a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain functions; for case, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that researchers say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after evaluation of my performance, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding False Alarm Percentages

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a string of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but seldom mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Possible Explanations

It was theorized that I likely possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and retain faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who similar to 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 Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments 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" strangers. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of documented instances all happened after a medical episode such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity 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 person recognition difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible HFF in extended periods of research.

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

{Understanding