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Throughout my twenties, I spotted my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the previous year. I gazed for a short time, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had comparable situations throughout my life. From time to time, I "identified" a person I had never met. At times I could promptly determine who the unknown individual resembled – for instance my grandma. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Lately, I began questioning if others have these peculiar situations. When I inquired my acquaintances, one mentioned she regularly sees persons in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others at times mistake a stranger or famous person 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 fascinated by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Person Recognition Capacities

Researchers have created many assessments to measure the capacity to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recall a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain mechanisms; for case, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would provide insight on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that researchers say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, then find it in groups. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after assessment of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Rates

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they review a series of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also surprised. I remembered many of the familiar visages, 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%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Potential Causes

It was theorized that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and commit faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of reported cases all took place after a medical episode such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with potential HFF in long durations of investigation.

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

{Understanding