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During my young adulthood, I observed my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had died the previous year. I looked intently for a short time, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had similar experiences during my life. Periodically, I "knew" a person I was unacquainted with. At times I could promptly identify who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – like my elderly relative. On other occasions, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

Recently, I began questioning if others have these odd experiences. When I inquired my acquaintances, one said she regularly sees persons in unpredictable places who look known. Others occasionally mistake a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Range of Person Recognition Skills

Scientists have created many assessments to measure the skill to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to recognize family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain processes; for instance, there is proof that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would shed some light on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers 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 over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several face identification tests. I worked 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 three angles, 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 quite place them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

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

Grasping False Alarm Rates

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but infrequently misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Plausible Causes

It was theorized that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and store faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention 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 prone to notice the stranger who resembles my grandmother. 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 tests helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of reported cases all took place after a medical episode such as a seizure or cerebral accident, 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 instruments like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

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

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think all visages is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding