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In my twenties, I noticed my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the year before. I stared for a moment, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered comparable experiences throughout my life. Periodically, I "knew" someone I had never met. Sometimes I could rapidly pinpoint who the unknown individual resembled – such as my elderly relative. In other instances, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Spectrum of Person Recognition Experiences

Lately, I started wondering if different individuals have these unusual encounters. When I inquired my friends, one said she frequently sees persons in unexpected places who look known. Others at times misidentify a stranger or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could effortlessly identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research 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 interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Researchers have developed many tests to assess the ability to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to know relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain functions; for instance, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt curious whether these evaluations would shed some light on why strangers look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a sentiment that scientists say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. 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 exactly identify them – comparable to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after evaluation of my performance, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – 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 extreme of the range, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the old faces, but rarely misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Potential Reasons

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Research suggests that the latter helps people to develop and retain faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of reported cases all happened after a medical episode such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the facial recall assessment.

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

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

{Understanding