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In my young adulthood, I spotted my grandmother through the window of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had departed the previous year. I stared for a short time, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd had comparable occurrences during my life. From time to time, I "recognized" a person I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could quickly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person resembled – such as my elderly relative. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Spectrum of Person Recognition Experiences

Recently, I started wondering if different individuals have these peculiar situations. When I asked my companions, one said she often sees individuals in random places who look known. Others sometimes mistake a stranger or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some described no such experiences – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Investigators have designed many tests to quantify the skill to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to recognize relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the ability to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain mechanisms; for example, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Person Recognition Tests

I felt interested whether these assessments would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that scientists say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed 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 real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after evaluation of my performance, I had accurately recognized 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping False Alarm Rates

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer threshold 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 astonished. I recalled many of the old faces, but infrequently misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Examining Potential Explanations

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, assign traits to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to develop and commit faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" strangers. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all occurred after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods 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 occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a continuum, with some people who think all visages is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding