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Throughout my mid-20s, I noticed my grandma through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had died the prior year. I stared for a short time, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced comparable occurrences all through my life. From time to time, I "identified" an individual I didn't know. Sometimes I could rapidly identify who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my grandma. Other times, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Investigating the Range of Face Identification Abilities

Lately, I began questioning if others have these odd encounters. When I asked my companions, one said she regularly sees individuals in unpredictable places who look known. Others at times misidentify a stranger or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported no such experiences – 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 mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Researchers have developed many assessments to measure the ability to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to recognize kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the capacity to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain functions; for example, there is indication that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these assessments would offer understanding on why strangers look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that researchers say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after assessment of my performance, I had accurately recognized 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding False Alarm Rates

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the old faces, but rarely misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Plausible Explanations

It was proposed that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the later element helps people to learn and store faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I positioned on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of reported cases all happened after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar 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 investigation.

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

{Understanding