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Throughout my mid-20s, I observed my elderly relative through the window of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the prior year. I looked intently for a short time, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced comparable experiences during my life. Periodically, I "identified" an individual I didn't know. At times I could rapidly pinpoint who the unknown individual looked like – like my elderly relative. In other instances, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Variety of Face Identification Capabilities

Recently, I became curious if others have these odd experiences. When I questioned my companions, one commented she frequently sees individuals in random places who look recognizable. Others at times confuse a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour 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 interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Person Recognition Skills

Researchers have developed many evaluations to assess the skill to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to know relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain functions; for instance, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Face Identification Tests

I felt curious whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – 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 known.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that instructed 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 – similar to my everyday experience.

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

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a string of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also surprised. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but infrequently mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Possible Reasons

It was suggested that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Research suggests that the later element helps people to develop and commit faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of documented instances all happened after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing 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 instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with possible HFF in long durations of study.

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

{Understanding