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Throughout my twenties, I observed my grandmother through the pane of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the previous year. I looked intently for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced comparable occurrences during my life. Occasionally, I "identified" a person I didn't know. Occasionally I could promptly identify who the unfamiliar person resembled – for instance my grandmother. Other times, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Variety of Facial Recognition Experiences

Lately, I started wondering if others have these odd situations. When I inquired my friends, one said she often sees individuals in random places who look recognizable. Others at times mistake a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some described nothing of the kind – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother 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 commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Range of Face Identification Capacities

Researchers have designed many evaluations to assess the ability to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to know family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the skill to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain functions; for example, there is indication that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Person Recognition Tests

I felt interested whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that researchers say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after analysis of my performance, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the familiar visages, but seldom mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Potential Reasons

It was suggested that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and store faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I stood on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of documented instances all occurred after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with potential HFF in extended periods of investigation.

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

{Understanding