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During my mid-20s, I noticed my elderly relative through the pane of a café. I felt stunned – she had departed the previous year. I stared for a moment, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd had comparable situations throughout my life. Periodically, I "recognized" a person I had never met. Sometimes I could rapidly identify who the stranger resembled – such as my grandmother. On other occasions, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I started wondering if others have these unusual encounters. When I questioned my companions, one mentioned she regularly sees people in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others sometimes mistake a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported completely different responses – they could effortlessly identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes 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 Continuum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Scientists have designed many evaluations to quantify the ability to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to know kin, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain functions; for case, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Person Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these tests would shed some light on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a feeling that researchers say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that told me to pick out public figures 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 uncertain about my outcome. But after assessment of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they review a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also astonished. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Plausible Reasons

It was theorized that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Research suggests that the latter helps people to develop and retain faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, 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 identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of reported cases all happened after a medical episode such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. 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 few of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of study.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think all visages is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding