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In my young adulthood, I observed my elderly relative through the pane of a café. I felt stunned – she had died the prior year. I gazed for a brief period, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd had analogous situations throughout my life. Periodically, I "identified" someone I didn't know. Sometimes I could rapidly determine who the unknown individual looked like – for instance my grandma. In other instances, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Investigating the Range of Face Identification Abilities

Lately, I became curious if other people have these peculiar situations. When I questioned my friends, one said she frequently sees individuals in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others sometimes misidentify a stranger or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some reported completely different responses – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds 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 Face Identification Skills

Scientists have developed many evaluations to quantify the skill to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to recognize family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how good 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 capacity to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use different brain mechanisms; for instance, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers 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 Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these tests would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a sentiment that experts say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several facial recognition 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 multiple perspectives, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – comparable to my actual experience.

I felt doubtful about my outcome. But after analysis of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a string of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the first set. 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 face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also surprised. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but seldom confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Plausible Causes

It was theorized that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive 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 learn and commit faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of documented instances all occurred after a physical event such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with possible HFF in many years of study.

"The frequency 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 experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding