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Throughout my mid-20s, I observed my elderly relative through the pane of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the year before. I gazed for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced comparable experiences during my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" a person I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could rapidly determine who the stranger looked like – for instance my grandmother. In other instances, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I began questioning if others have these unusual encounters. When I asked my companions, one said she regularly sees persons in unexpected places who look known. Others sometimes misidentify a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour 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 interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Researchers have designed many evaluations to measure the ability to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to recognize family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain mechanisms; for case, there is indication that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these tests would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that experts say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out public figures 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 less than confident about my outcome. But after analysis of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the first set. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also surprised. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Plausible Causes

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, assign traits to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and store faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all occurred after a medical episode such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. 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 suspected HFF in many years of research.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a continuum, with some people who think each countenance is familiar, and others, like me, who only undergo it a few times a month.

{Understanding