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In my mid-20s, I spotted my elderly relative through the glass of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the prior year. I gazed for a brief period, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd had analogous situations all through my life. Occasionally, I "knew" a person I didn't know. At times I could rapidly identify who the stranger looked like – for instance my elderly relative. Other times, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Investigating the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Lately, I became curious if different individuals have these peculiar situations. When I questioned my companions, one mentioned she often sees individuals in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others at times confuse a stranger or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some described nothing of the kind – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Researchers have created many assessments to measure the ability to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to identify family, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the ability to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain mechanisms; for example, there is proof that super-recognizers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Face Identification Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would provide insight on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a feeling that experts say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I received several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after analysis of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a series of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also astonished. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but infrequently misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Potential Explanations

It was theorized that I likely possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, assign traits to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and commit faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of documented instances all happened after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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

"The frequency 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 familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding