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In my young adulthood, I noticed my grandma through the glass of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the year before. I gazed for a short time, then reminded myself it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered analogous situations during my life. From time to time, I "recognized" an individual I was unacquainted with. At times I could rapidly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – such as my grandmother. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I started wondering if other people have these peculiar situations. When I asked my acquaintances, one commented she regularly sees people in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others at times misidentify a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation 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.

Grasping the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Researchers have designed many evaluations to measure the capacity to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to identify relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the ability to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use different brain functions; for case, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Face Identification Assessments

I felt interested whether these assessments would provide insight on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a feeling that researchers say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

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

Understanding Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a series of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also astonished. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Possible Explanations

It was theorized that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, assign traits to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Research suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and store faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

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

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments 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" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of documented instances all took place after a physical event such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including perceptual alterations, 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 handful of people with possible HFF in long durations of investigation.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think each countenance is familiar, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding