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Throughout my twenties, I spotted my elderly relative through the glass of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the previous year. I looked intently for a moment, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd had comparable situations throughout my life. Occasionally, I "identified" someone I didn't know. Sometimes I could rapidly identify who the stranger reminded me of – for instance my elderly relative. Other times, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Exploring the Variety of Person Recognition Capabilities

In recent times, I started wondering if different individuals have these unusual encounters. When I inquired my companions, one mentioned she regularly sees individuals in unpredictable places who look known. Others at times misidentify a stranger or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some reported no such experiences – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative 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 commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Investigators have created many tests to measure the skill to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; 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 proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the capacity to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain processes; for instance, there is proof that superior face rememberers 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.

Taking Person Recognition Tests

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a sentiment that scientists say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after analysis of my performance, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending False Alarm Percentages

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they review a series of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also surprised. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but rarely misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers 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?

Examining Possible Reasons

It was proposed 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 near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and store faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was thought 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 stranger who resembles my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a disorder 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 took place after a physical event such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including sight abnormalities, 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 extended periods of investigation.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a continuum, with some people who think each countenance is recognizable, and others, like me, who only experience it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding