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During my young adulthood, I spotted my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had departed the year before. I gazed for a moment, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered similar occurrences all through my life. From time to time, I "recognized" a person I was unacquainted with. At times I could promptly pinpoint who the stranger resembled – such as my elderly relative. On other occasions, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Variety of Person Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I started wondering if different individuals have these unusual encounters. When I asked my friends, one said she regularly sees persons in random places who look familiar. Others sometimes confuse a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some described completely different responses – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Range of Person Recognition Capacities

Researchers have developed many assessments to assess the skill to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to recognize family, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I have limitations. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for instance, there is proof that superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Face Identification Tests

I felt interested whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that researchers say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I received several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from three angles, then find it in arrays. During another test that told 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 – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after analysis of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the initial group. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also surprised. I recalled many of the old faces, but seldom mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Potential Reasons

It was theorized that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and likely near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to learn and commit faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", 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 carefully at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all took place after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

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

Experts have heard from only a few of people with suspected HFF in long durations of study.

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

{Understanding