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During my young adulthood, I observed my elderly relative through the window of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had died the previous year. I stared for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd had comparable occurrences all through my life. Occasionally, I "identified" an individual I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could promptly determine who the unfamiliar person resembled – such as my grandmother. Other times, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Spectrum of Face Identification Abilities

Recently, I started wondering if others have these peculiar situations. When I asked my companions, one said she often sees people in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others sometimes misidentify a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some reported completely different responses – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Scientific investigation 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 perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Skills

Researchers have developed many tests to measure the skill to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to know relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the skill to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain mechanisms; for case, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that scientists say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in arrays. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after assessment of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also surprised. I remembered many of the old faces, but rarely misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Examining Plausible Causes

It was proposed that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to learn and commit faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of documented instances all happened after a health incident such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in many years of study.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think all visages is familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a few times a month.

{Understanding