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In my mid-20s, I observed my elderly relative through the glass of a café. I felt astonished – she had died the year before. I gazed for a moment, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced analogous situations throughout my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" someone I had never met. Sometimes I could rapidly determine who the stranger looked like – such as my elderly relative. Other times, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Examining the Variety of Facial Recognition Experiences

Lately, I started wondering if different individuals have these peculiar experiences. When I inquired my companions, one mentioned she regularly sees persons in unexpected places who look known. Others occasionally mistake a unfamiliar individual or celebrity 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 intrigued by this range of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes 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.

Comprehending the Spectrum of Person Recognition Skills

Scientists have developed many tests to assess the ability to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to identify family, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the skill to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain functions; for case, there is proof that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Face Identification Tests

I felt interested whether these tests would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that scientists say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, then find it in arrays. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after evaluation of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding False Alarm Rates

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they review a string of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also surprised. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but seldom confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Possible Causes

It was proposed that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, assign traits to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and store faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who similar to 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 Over-familiarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of reported cases all took place after a physical event such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected HFF in many years of investigation.

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

{Understanding