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During my mid-20s, I observed my grandmother through the window of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the prior year. I gazed for a short time, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd had analogous occurrences all through my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" someone I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could promptly pinpoint who the unknown individual looked like – such as my grandma. In other instances, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Examining the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I started wondering if different individuals have these peculiar experiences. When I asked my companions, one said she frequently sees people in unexpected places who look familiar. Others occasionally misidentify a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research 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 perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Face Identification Skills

Scientists have developed many evaluations to quantify the skill to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to identify family, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the skill to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain functions; for example, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Assessments

I felt curious whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a sentiment that scientists say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I waded 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 recognizable, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after analysis of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a series of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the old faces, but seldom mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Examining Possible Reasons

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to develop and store faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus 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 unfamiliar individual who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of reported cases all happened after a physical event such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected 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 each countenance is recognizable, and others, like me, who only undergo it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding