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In my twenties, I noticed my grandma through the window of a café. I felt astonished – she had passed away the previous year. I gazed for a brief period, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had analogous occurrences during my life. Periodically, I "identified" a person I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could rapidly determine who the stranger looked like – like my elderly relative. Other times, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Range of Face Identification Capabilities

Recently, I began questioning if different individuals have these peculiar situations. When I asked my friends, one mentioned she often sees individuals in random places who look recognizable. Others at times misidentify a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Scientific investigation 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.

Understanding the Continuum of Person Recognition Abilities

Researchers have designed many evaluations to measure the capacity to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to know family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the skill to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain processes; for example, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would provide insight on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a emotion that scientists say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my everyday experience.

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

Understanding Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they review a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify 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 range, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also astonished. I recognized many of the old faces, but rarely misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Plausible Causes

It was proposed that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and store faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of reported cases all happened after a physical event such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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

"The occurrence rate 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 encounter it a few times a month.

{Understanding