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During my mid-20s, I spotted my grandma through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the year before. I stared for a moment, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd had analogous experiences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "knew" an individual I had never met. Sometimes I could quickly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – like my elderly relative. Other times, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Examining the Variety of Person Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I started wondering if different individuals have these peculiar experiences. When I inquired my companions, one commented she frequently sees people in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others sometimes mistake a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Face Identification Skills

Investigators have created many assessments to quantify the ability to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to recognize relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the skill to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain mechanisms; for instance, there is indication that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Person Recognition Tests

I felt interested whether these tests would provide insight on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that researchers say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my everyday experience.

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

Grasping False Alarm Rates

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a string of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the old faces, but rarely misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Possible Causes

It was proposed that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and commit faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", 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 closely at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Examining 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 pertain to me. But the handful of reported cases all happened after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the facial recall assessment.

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

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a range, with some people who think each countenance is recognizable, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding