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Throughout my mid-20s, I observed my elderly relative through the pane of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the prior year. I gazed for a brief period, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd had analogous occurrences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "identified" someone I was unacquainted with. At times I could promptly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person looked like – such as my grandma. On other occasions, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Investigating the Spectrum of Face Identification Abilities

Recently, I became curious if other people have these odd encounters. When I inquired my acquaintances, one commented she often sees individuals in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others occasionally mistake a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some reported completely different responses – they could effortlessly identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my elderly relative 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 beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Facial Recognition Skills

Scientists have designed many assessments to assess the ability to recall faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain mechanisms; for instance, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Tests

I felt interested whether these assessments would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a feeling that experts say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, 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 familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after evaluation of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a string of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also astonished. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but seldom confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Examining Possible Causes

It was suggested that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to develop and commit faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who resembles my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of documented instances all happened after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in long durations of research.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a range, with some people who think each countenance is known, and others, like me, who only experience it a few times a month.

{Understanding