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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 departed the previous year. I looked intently for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered similar experiences throughout my life. From time to time, I "identified" a person I didn't know. At times I could quickly determine who the unknown individual reminded me of – like my elderly relative. Other times, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Exploring the Spectrum of Person Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I became curious if different individuals have these odd encounters. When I asked my companions, one commented she regularly sees individuals in random places who look known. Others sometimes misidentify a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some described no such experiences – they could effortlessly identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Researchers have created many assessments to quantify the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to know relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the ability to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain functions; for case, there is evidence that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these evaluations would shed some light on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a emotion that scientists say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling confused 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 lineups. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after analysis of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they review a series of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the old faces, but seldom misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Plausible Reasons

It was suggested that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to learn and store faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition 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. Investigating further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all occurred after a health incident such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a handful 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 spectrum, with some people who think all visages is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding