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Throughout my young adulthood, I spotted my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the year before. I looked intently for a moment, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced similar situations throughout my life. Periodically, I "identified" an individual I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could quickly determine who the stranger looked like – such as my elderly relative. Other times, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Range of Facial Recognition Experiences

Lately, I started wondering if other people have these odd encounters. When I questioned my friends, one said she regularly sees persons in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others at times confuse a stranger or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some described no such experiences – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Facial Recognition Skills

Scientists have created many tests to assess the ability to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to recognize kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the skill to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain functions; for example, there is evidence that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these assessments would offer understanding on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that researchers say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from multiple perspectives, 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 familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my actual experience.

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

Comprehending False Alarm Percentages

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the old faces, but infrequently misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Plausible Reasons

It was theorized that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and commit faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Over-familiarity 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 "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all happened after a medical episode such as a convulsion or brain attack, 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 problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with potential HFF in extended periods of study.

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

{Understanding