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Throughout my young adulthood, I noticed my grandma through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had departed the year before. I stared for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd had similar experiences throughout my life. Periodically, I "identified" someone I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could quickly identify who the unknown individual resembled – such as my grandma. Other times, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I started wondering if different individuals have these odd encounters. When I asked my companions, one mentioned she frequently sees individuals in unpredictable places who look known. Others occasionally confuse a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research has found we spend about 14 minutes 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.

Grasping the Range of Face Identification Abilities

Researchers have designed many tests to measure the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, 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 recognize relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain functions; for instance, there is indication that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a feeling that scientists say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my real-life experience.

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

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, 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 stranger's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Possible Reasons

It was proposed that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and commit faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention 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 inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" strangers. Researching further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of documented instances all took place after a health incident such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the quirk 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 face identification challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible HFF in long durations of study.

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

{Understanding