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During my mid-20s, I spotted my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had passed away the year before. I looked intently for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered analogous experiences all through my life. Occasionally, I "identified" someone I had never met. At times I could rapidly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – like my elderly relative. In other instances, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Range of Face Identification Experiences

Lately, I started wondering if others have these peculiar encounters. When I inquired my acquaintances, one said she frequently sees persons in random places who look recognizable. Others occasionally confuse a unfamiliar individual or famous person 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 intrigued by this spectrum of responses. Was it just longing 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 make mistakes sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Face Identification Abilities

Investigators have developed many evaluations to assess the capacity to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to identify kin, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the ability to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for example, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would offer understanding on why strangers look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that researchers say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at monochrome 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 exactly identify them – similar to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after evaluation of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the first set. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also astonished. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but rarely mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this indicator, 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 mistaking a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Possible Reasons

It was theorized that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to learn and commit faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice 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 stranger who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of documented instances all occurred after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in extended periods of study.

"The prevalence 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 familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a few times a month.

{Understanding