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During my mid-20s, I spotted my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had passed away the year before. I gazed for a short time, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered comparable occurrences all through my life. Periodically, I "identified" someone I had never met. Occasionally I could quickly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – like my grandma. On other occasions, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Range of Person Recognition Experiences

Recently, I became curious if different individuals have these peculiar experiences. When I asked my companions, one mentioned she frequently sees individuals in random places who look recognizable. Others occasionally mistake a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported completely different responses – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Person Recognition Abilities

Scientists have created many assessments to measure the ability to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to recognize relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests 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 researchers "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the skill to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain processes; for example, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt intrigued whether these tests would offer understanding on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a emotion that researchers say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several face identification tests. I completed 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 multiple perspectives, then find it in arrays. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after evaluation of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping False Alarm Percentages

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they review a sequence of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the initial group. 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 prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but seldom mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Potential Explanations

It was theorized that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer 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 comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, assign traits to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and retain faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely 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 acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. 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 excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of documented instances all happened after a physical event such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the known/unknown countenances 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 prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think all visages is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding