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During my mid-20s, I noticed my grandma through the pane of a café. I felt stunned – she had died the prior year. I stared for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced analogous situations all through my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" someone I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could promptly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – like my grandma. In other instances, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I became curious if different individuals have these peculiar experiences. When I inquired my friends, one commented she frequently sees individuals in unpredictable places who look known. Others sometimes confuse a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly distinguish 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 mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Investigators have created many evaluations to quantify the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to identify relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the capacity to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain processes; for case, there is indication that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Face Identification Tests

I felt interested whether these tests would offer understanding on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that researchers say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my everyday experience.

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

Grasping Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a series of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also surprised. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Examining Potential Reasons

It was proposed that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to develop and store faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus 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 inclined to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests 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 excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of reported cases all occurred after a medical episode such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods 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 extended periods of investigation.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a continuum, with some people who think every face is known, and others, like me, who only encounter it a few times a month.

{Understanding