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Throughout my mid-20s, I spotted my grandmother through the window of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had died the year before. I looked intently for a moment, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced comparable situations throughout my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" a person I didn't know. Occasionally I could quickly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – like my grandma. On other occasions, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Spectrum of Person Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I started wondering if other people have these peculiar experiences. When I inquired my acquaintances, one commented she often sees persons in unexpected places who look familiar. Others sometimes misidentify a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some described completely different responses – they could effortlessly identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour 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.

Comprehending the Range of Facial Recognition Skills

Investigators have created many evaluations to measure the skill to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to know relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But researchers "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the skill to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain processes; for example, there is proof that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would shed some light on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a feeling that scientists say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several person recognition tests. I waded 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 groups. During another test that directed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place 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 famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective 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 look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate 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 range, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also surprised. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but seldom mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Possible Explanations

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and likely near-exceptional individuals 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 impoliteness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to learn and commit faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice 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 unknown person who resembles 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.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of documented instances all happened after a physical event such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

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

"The prevalence 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 recognizable, and others, like me, who only encounter it a few times a month.

{Understanding