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Throughout my twenties, I observed my grandma through the window of a café. I felt stunned – she had departed the year before. I gazed for a moment, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced analogous situations during my life. From time to time, I "identified" a person I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could quickly identify who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – like my grandmother. Other times, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Investigating the Range of Facial Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I began questioning if different individuals have these peculiar experiences. When I asked my companions, one mentioned she frequently sees people in unpredictable places who look known. Others sometimes confuse a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some described completely different responses – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Range of Facial Recognition Skills

Researchers have created many tests to quantify the ability to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to identify kin, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But researchers "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the skill to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain functions; for case, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these tests would shed some light on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a emotion that experts say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, 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 recognizable, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after assessment of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also astonished. I recalled many of the old faces, but infrequently mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Possible Reasons

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, assign traits to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Research suggests that the later element helps people to develop and store faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice 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 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 Over-familiarity 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 "know" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all took place after a physical event such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing 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 facial recognition challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in extended periods of investigation.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think each countenance is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding