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In my young adulthood, I noticed my grandma through the glass of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had died the prior year. I gazed for a short time, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd had similar occurrences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" an individual I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could quickly identify who the stranger looked like – such as my grandma. In other instances, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Examining the Range of Person Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I became curious if others have these odd experiences. When I questioned my acquaintances, one mentioned she frequently sees individuals in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others occasionally mistake a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported completely different responses – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Range of Person Recognition Abilities

Researchers have designed many tests to assess the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to recognize family, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain functions; for case, 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.

Completing Face Identification Assessments

I felt interested whether these assessments would shed some light on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that experts say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, 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 known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

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

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a string of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the first set. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Examining Plausible Causes

It was proposed that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to develop and store faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests 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 syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. 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 seizure or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with potential 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 spectrum, with some people who think every face is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding