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Throughout my twenties, I noticed my grandmother through the pane of a café. I felt astonished – she had died the year before. I gazed for a moment, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered comparable experiences all through my life. Occasionally, I "knew" a person I had never met. Sometimes I could rapidly identify who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – for instance my grandmother. In other instances, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Range of Person Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I became curious if others have these unusual encounters. When I asked my companions, one mentioned she frequently sees individuals in unpredictable places who look known. Others occasionally misidentify a stranger or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some reported no such experiences – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research 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.

Grasping the Continuum of Person Recognition Abilities

Scientists have developed many assessments to quantify the ability to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to recognize relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the skill to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain functions; for instance, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that scientists say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my outcome. But after evaluation of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a string of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the old faces, but infrequently mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Plausible Causes

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to develop and retain faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I positioned on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of documented instances all happened after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with potential HFF in many years of investigation.

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

{Understanding