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In my twenties, I observed my grandmother through the pane of a café. I felt stunned – she had died the previous year. I stared for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced comparable situations throughout my life. From time to time, I "recognized" a person I had never met. Occasionally I could promptly pinpoint who the unknown individual reminded me of – such as my elderly relative. Other times, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capabilities

In recent times, I started wondering if other people have these odd encounters. When I questioned my companions, one mentioned she frequently sees individuals in random places who look recognizable. Others sometimes confuse a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could effortlessly identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Person Recognition Skills

Researchers have designed many tests to quantify the ability to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to recognize relatives, 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 suspect I am deficient. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the ability to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain mechanisms; for case, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would provide insight on why strangers look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that scientists say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after evaluation of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a series of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also astonished. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but seldom mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Potential Explanations

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and store faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger 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.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all occurred after a medical episode such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible HFF in many years of study.

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

{Understanding