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During my young adulthood, I observed my grandmother through the window of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had departed the year before. I looked intently for a moment, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced comparable situations all through my life. Periodically, I "knew" an individual I didn't know. Occasionally I could quickly determine who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – such as my grandmother. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Spectrum of Face Identification Abilities

In recent times, I became curious if others have these unusual situations. When I asked my companions, one mentioned she frequently sees people in random places who look recognizable. Others sometimes confuse a stranger or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some reported completely different responses – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds 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 perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Face Identification Capacities

Scientists have created many assessments to assess the skill to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to identify relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the skill to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use different brain processes; for instance, there is proof that super-recognizers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would offer understanding on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a emotion that scientists say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after assessment of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding False Alarm Rates

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a string of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the first set. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also surprised. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Examining Possible Explanations

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to develop and store faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention 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 stranger who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all took place after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with suspected HFF in long durations 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 all visages is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding