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Throughout my young adulthood, I observed my grandma through the glass of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the prior year. I looked intently for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced similar situations during my life. From time to time, I "identified" someone I didn't know. Occasionally I could quickly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – such as my grandmother. Other times, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Exploring the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

Lately, I became curious if different individuals have these odd situations. When I questioned my acquaintances, one commented she frequently sees individuals in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others sometimes mistake a stranger or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Person Recognition Skills

Investigators have created many tests to quantify the ability to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to identify kin, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain functions; for example, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these tests would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that experts say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in lineups. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't quite place them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after evaluation of my results, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping False Alarm Frequencies

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a string of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also astonished. I remembered 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 incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Plausible Explanations

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to learn and commit faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me remember 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 "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who resembles my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments 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" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of reported cases all took place after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in extended periods of study.

"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 all visages is recognizable, and others, like me, who only undergo it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding