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During my mid-20s, I spotted my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the year before. I stared for a moment, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered comparable occurrences throughout my life. Periodically, I "recognized" an individual I was unacquainted with. At times I could quickly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – for instance my elderly relative. In other instances, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I became curious if different individuals have these peculiar encounters. When I inquired my friends, one commented she regularly sees people in unexpected places who look known. Others occasionally mistake a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of responses. Was it just yearning 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 starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Range of Face Identification Skills

Investigators have created many tests to quantify the skill to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are super-recognizers, who remember 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, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how good someone is at determining 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 studied the capacity to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain processes; for instance, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Tests

I felt curious whether these assessments would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that scientists say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from three angles, 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 recognizable, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my outcome. But after analysis of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding False Alarm Percentages

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the old faces, but rarely confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics 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 Possible Causes

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, assign traits to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to develop and commit faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I sat on the range. 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 over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all occurred after a medical episode such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

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

"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 known, and others, like me, who only encounter it a few times a month.

{Understanding