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Throughout my mid-20s, I spotted my grandmother through the pane of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had passed away the year before. I stared for a brief period, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced comparable experiences all through my life. Periodically, I "knew" someone I didn't know. At times I could rapidly determine who the unknown individual looked like – such as my grandmother. In other instances, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Variety of Person Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I began questioning if others have these odd experiences. When I asked my acquaintances, one commented she often sees individuals in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others occasionally misidentify a stranger or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Skills

Investigators have developed many evaluations to quantify the skill to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to know family, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the capacity to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain processes; for instance, there is indication that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Tests

I felt interested whether these tests would offer understanding on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that scientists say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. 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 exactly identify them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

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

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a series of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify 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 properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also astonished. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but rarely mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Examining Potential Reasons

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, assign traits to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to learn and retain faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a syndrome called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of reported cases all occurred after a physical event such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a small number 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 range, with some people who think each countenance is known, and others, like me, who only encounter it a few times a month.

{Understanding