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Throughout my twenties, I noticed my elderly relative through the window of a café. I felt stunned – she had died the prior year. I stared for a moment, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced comparable experiences during my life. Occasionally, I "identified" a person I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could promptly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my grandmother. In other instances, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

Lately, I became curious if other people have these unusual experiences. When I questioned my friends, one said she regularly sees people in random places who look recognizable. Others occasionally mistake a unknown person or public figure 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 desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Face Identification Skills

Researchers have developed many assessments to quantify the skill to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to recognize relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the skill to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain processes; for case, there is proof that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that experts say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in lineups. During another test that told me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after evaluation of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding Incorrect Identification Rates

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 series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Possible Causes

It was suggested that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and likely near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and commit faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of documented instances all took place after a medical episode such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in long durations of investigation.

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

{Understanding