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Throughout my young adulthood, I spotted my elderly relative through the pane of a café. I felt stunned – she had died the year before. I gazed for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced comparable occurrences all through my life. Periodically, I "identified" an individual I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could quickly identify who the stranger reminded me of – like my grandmother. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Examining the Variety of Person Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I began questioning if other people have these odd situations. When I inquired my friends, one mentioned she frequently sees persons in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others at times misidentify a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described nothing of the kind – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research has found we spend about 14 minutes 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 experience the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capacities

Researchers have developed many tests to quantify the capacity to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to identify kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the ability to recall a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain processes; for instance, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these tests would shed some light on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they remember 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 familiar.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after analysis of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping False Alarm Frequencies

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the first set. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but seldom mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Possible Reasons

It was theorized that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to develop and retain faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I stood on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized 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 cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the facial recall assessment.

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

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think all visages is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding