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In my young adulthood, I noticed my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had departed the year before. I looked intently for a short time, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced analogous occurrences throughout my life. Periodically, I "recognized" a person I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could promptly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person resembled – such as my elderly relative. In other instances, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Variety of Facial Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I started wondering if other people have these unusual experiences. When I asked my acquaintances, one said she often sees individuals in unpredictable places who look known. Others sometimes confuse a stranger or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some described completely different responses – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes 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 Continuum of Person Recognition Skills

Investigators have designed many tests to assess the ability to recall faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to know relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated 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 mechanisms; for case, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Person Recognition Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these tests would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that researchers say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I received several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after analysis of my results, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a string of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also surprised. I recognized many of the old faces, but rarely misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Possible Causes

It was proposed that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Research suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and retain faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition 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 "know" strangers. Researching further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of reported cases all happened after a health incident such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person 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 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 every face is familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding