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Throughout my young adulthood, I observed my grandmother through the glass of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the year before. I gazed for a moment, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced analogous occurrences during my life. From time to time, I "knew" an individual I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could rapidly determine who the unknown individual resembled – such as my grandma. On other occasions, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Range of Facial Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I became curious if different individuals have these unusual experiences. When I questioned my friends, one commented she often sees people in random places who look familiar. Others at times mistake a stranger or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma 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 err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Face Identification Abilities

Investigators have developed many evaluations to measure the skill to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are superior face rememberers, 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 kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the skill to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain functions; for example, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Assessments

I felt curious whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a feeling that scientists say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from three angles, then find it in lineups. During another test that directed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't quite place them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after assessment of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Rates

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 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 satisfied with my performance, but also astonished. I recognized many of the old faces, but rarely 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 false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Plausible Causes

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the later element helps people to develop and retain faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more false alarm 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 similar to my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments 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" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of documented instances all happened after a medical episode such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. 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 long durations of research.

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

{Understanding