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In my young adulthood, I noticed my grandmother through the glass of a café. I felt stunned – she had departed the year before. I gazed for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered similar occurrences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "knew" an individual I had never met. Occasionally I could rapidly identify who the unknown individual reminded me of – like my grandmother. In other instances, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Exploring the Range of Face Identification Abilities

In recent times, I started wondering if other people have these unusual experiences. When I inquired my companions, one mentioned she frequently sees individuals in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others at times mistake a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research has found we spend about 14 minutes 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 Continuum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Investigators have created many evaluations to measure the capacity to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to know relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the skill to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use different brain processes; for case, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these tests would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that researchers say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent 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 black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after analysis of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding False Alarm Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a string of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also surprised. I recalled many of the old faces, but seldom misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Possible Reasons

It was theorized that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and commit faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify 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 elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Over-familiarity 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 "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of documented instances all happened after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been observing 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 person recognition problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with potential HFF in extended periods of investigation.

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

{Understanding