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In my young adulthood, I observed my grandma through the glass of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had died the prior year. I gazed for a short time, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered similar occurrences during my life. Occasionally, I "identified" a person I didn't know. At times I could promptly identify who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – such as my grandmother. In other instances, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Examining the Range of Person Recognition Experiences

Lately, I began questioning if different individuals have these odd encounters. When I asked my acquaintances, one mentioned she regularly sees individuals in random places who look recognizable. Others at times confuse a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described completely different responses – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research 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.

Comprehending the Spectrum of Face Identification Capacities

Researchers have designed many assessments to measure the skill to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to identify kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain processes; for case, there is evidence that super-recognizers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt intrigued whether these tests would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that scientists say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling confused 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 groups. During another test that directed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after analysis of my performance, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but rarely confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers 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?

Examining Plausible Causes

It was proposed that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and commit faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

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 know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of reported cases all took place after a medical episode such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

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

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

{Understanding