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During my twenties, I spotted my grandmother through the window of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the prior year. I gazed for a moment, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced analogous occurrences all through my life. Periodically, I "identified" someone I was unacquainted with. At times I could quickly identify who the unfamiliar person resembled – like my grandmother. Other times, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Range of Face Identification Abilities

Lately, I became curious if other people have these unusual situations. When I asked my acquaintances, one said she frequently sees people in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others occasionally mistake a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some reported no such experiences – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capacities

Scientists have created many assessments to quantify the capacity to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to recognize family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the ability to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain functions; for example, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Face Identification Evaluations

I felt curious whether these tests would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that experts say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after assessment of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping False Alarm Rates

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a string of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the first set. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the old faces, but seldom confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Possible Causes

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and store faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also mislead 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 mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching 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 "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all occurred after a physical event such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, 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 Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with potential HFF in extended periods of research.

"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 recognizable, and others, like me, who only experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding