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In my young adulthood, I noticed my grandmother through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the prior year. I stared for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had comparable experiences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "identified" a person I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could rapidly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person resembled – for instance my grandmother. On other occasions, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Range of Face Identification Capabilities

In recent times, I became curious if other people have these peculiar experiences. When I asked my companions, one mentioned she regularly sees people in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others occasionally confuse a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just desire 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 starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Range of Person Recognition Skills

Investigators have created many tests to measure the capacity to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how good someone is at determining 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 looked at the skill to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain mechanisms; for instance, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Face Identification Assessments

I felt curious whether these assessments would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that scientists say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, then find it in lineups. 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 real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my outcome. But after analysis of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also surprised. I recognized many of the old faces, but infrequently confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Plausible Explanations

It was theorized that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to learn and retain faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", 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 carefully at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all happened after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, 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 tools like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with potential HFF in many years of research.

"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