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Throughout my mid-20s, I observed my elderly relative through the window of a café. I felt stunned – she had departed the year before. I gazed for a moment, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced comparable situations during my life. From time to time, I "recognized" someone I didn't know. At times I could quickly determine who the unfamiliar person resembled – like my elderly relative. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Spectrum of Face Identification Abilities

Recently, I started wondering if different individuals have these unusual encounters. When I inquired my companions, one said she regularly sees individuals in random places who look known. Others at times mistake a stranger or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some reported no such experiences – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour 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 Face Identification Capacities

Scientists have designed many evaluations to quantify the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recognize 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 know family, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the ability to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain functions; for instance, there is indication that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Tests

I felt interested whether these assessments would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that scientists say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several facial recognition tests. I completed 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 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 exactly identify them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after assessment of my performance, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a string of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate 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 side of the spectrum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also astonished. I remembered many of the old faces, but seldom mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Possible Causes

It was proposed that I probably 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 relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, assign traits to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Research suggests that the later element helps people to develop and retain faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice 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 unfamiliar individual who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all happened after a health incident such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. 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 few of people with possible HFF in extended periods 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 every face is recognizable, and others, like me, who only experience it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding