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During my mid-20s, I noticed my grandmother through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the prior year. I stared for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered analogous occurrences throughout my life. From time to time, I "knew" an individual I didn't know. At times I could quickly pinpoint who the unknown individual looked like – such as my grandma. On other occasions, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Examining the Range of Facial Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I began questioning if other people have these peculiar encounters. When I questioned my friends, one said she frequently sees people in random places who look known. Others sometimes confuse a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some described completely different responses – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Range of Face Identification Abilities

Scientists have created many evaluations to assess the skill to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But researchers "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the ability to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for case, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Tests

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that scientists say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several facial recognition tests. I completed 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 lineups. During another test that instructed 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 – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after assessment of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping False Alarm Percentages

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they review a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also astonished. I recognized many of the old faces, but seldom mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, 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 grandma's?

Examining Plausible Explanations

It was suggested that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, assign traits to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and retain faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted 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 spectrum. 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 excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of reported cases all happened after a health incident such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing 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 facial recognition difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with possible HFF in many years of investigation.

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

{Understanding