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Throughout my mid-20s, I observed my elderly relative through the pane of a café. I felt astonished – she had passed away the previous year. I stared for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd had analogous situations all through my life. Occasionally, I "knew" someone I was unacquainted with. At times I could rapidly identify who the stranger resembled – like my elderly relative. In other instances, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Investigating the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Recently, I started wondering if other people have these odd situations. When I questioned my acquaintances, one commented she regularly sees individuals in unexpected places who look known. Others sometimes confuse a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Person Recognition Capacities

Investigators have created many evaluations to quantify the skill to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to identify relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the skill to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain mechanisms; for instance, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these assessments would offer understanding on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a feeling that experts say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after evaluation of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also astonished. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but infrequently mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Possible Explanations

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Research suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and commit faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These assessments 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. Examining further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all occurred after a medical episode such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think each countenance is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a few times a month.

{Understanding