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Throughout my twenties, I spotted my grandma through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had died the previous year. I gazed for a short time, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered similar occurrences during my life. Periodically, I "knew" someone I didn't know. Occasionally I could quickly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person resembled – for instance my grandma. On other occasions, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Spectrum of Face Identification Experiences

Lately, I became curious if other people have these unusual encounters. When I questioned my acquaintances, one mentioned she regularly sees individuals in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others at times confuse a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Investigators have designed many evaluations to quantify the skill to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to know kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain processes; for case, there is evidence that super-recognizers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Tests

I felt interested whether these tests would offer understanding on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a feeling that researchers say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, then find it in groups. During another test that directed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after evaluation of my performance, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Percentages

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also astonished. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but infrequently mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Possible Causes

It was proposed that I probably possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and store faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I sat on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" strangers. Examining further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all took place after a medical episode such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with potential HFF in many years 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 each countenance is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding