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During my mid-20s, I spotted my grandma through the pane of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the year before. I stared for a short time, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced comparable situations throughout my life. Occasionally, I "knew" a person I didn't know. Sometimes I could rapidly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my grandmother. In other instances, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Exploring the Variety of Face Identification Experiences

Recently, I started wondering if others have these odd experiences. When I inquired my companions, one commented she often sees individuals in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others at times confuse a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Researchers have created many assessments to assess the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to know kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the ability to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain functions; for example, there is indication that super-recognizers 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 provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a emotion that researchers say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

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 three angles, then find it in arrays. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain 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 "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a series of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Potential Explanations

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and commit faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, 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 carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person 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 "know" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all occurred after a physical event such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of research.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think each countenance is known, and others, like me, who only experience it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding