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In my twenties, I noticed my grandma through the pane of a café. I felt stunned – she had died the previous year. I gazed for a short time, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had similar occurrences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" a person I had never met. Occasionally I could rapidly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – like my grandma. In other instances, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Range of Person Recognition Experiences

Recently, I began questioning if others have these unusual situations. When I questioned my friends, one commented she frequently sees people in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others occasionally mistake a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported completely different responses – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Spectrum of Person Recognition Skills

Scientists have developed many tests to quantify the skill to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to recognize family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated 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 different brain functions; for instance, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these assessments would provide insight on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that scientists say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, then find it in lineups. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after evaluation of my performance, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping False Alarm Frequencies

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they review a sequence of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the old faces, but seldom misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Potential Explanations

It was suggested that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to develop and retain faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity 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" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of reported cases all took place after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including sight abnormalities, 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 handful of people with possible HFF in many years of research.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a range, with some people who think all visages is known, and others, like me, who only experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding