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Throughout my twenties, I spotted my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had departed the previous year. I looked intently for a short time, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered similar occurrences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" an individual I was unacquainted with. At times I could promptly pinpoint who the stranger resembled – like my grandma. Other times, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Exploring the Range of Facial Recognition Experiences

Lately, I became curious if others have these unusual experiences. When I questioned my friends, one commented she often sees persons in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others sometimes mistake a stranger or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some described nothing of the kind – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative 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 make mistakes sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Person Recognition Abilities

Scientists have designed many assessments to quantify the ability to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to identify kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the capacity to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain mechanisms; for case, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would provide insight on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a sentiment that researchers say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I received several face identification tests. I worked 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 multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. 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 – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after evaluation of my performance, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a series of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also surprised. I recalled many of the old faces, but infrequently misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Possible Explanations

It was suggested that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to develop and commit faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, 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 attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations 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" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of documented instances all occurred after a medical episode such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

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

Experts have heard from only a few of people with possible HFF in extended periods of research.

"The prevalence 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 experience it a few times a month.

{Understanding