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In my twenties, I spotted my elderly relative through the pane of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the year before. I looked intently for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered analogous situations throughout my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" an individual I didn't know. Sometimes I could quickly determine who the stranger looked like – such as my grandma. On other occasions, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Variety of Face Identification Abilities

Recently, I started wondering if others have these odd encounters. When I asked my companions, one commented she frequently sees individuals in unexpected places who look familiar. Others at times confuse a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour 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 perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Person Recognition Abilities

Investigators have created many tests to quantify the skill to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to know relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use different brain functions; for instance, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Tests

I felt interested whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that experts say is typical for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, 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 known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt doubtful about my outcome. But after evaluation of my performance, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping False Alarm Percentages

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a string of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 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 content with my score, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Possible Reasons

It was proposed that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Research suggests that the later element helps people to develop and commit faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification 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 elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of reported cases all occurred after a health incident such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity 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 face identification challenges, 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 Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with potential HFF in long durations of study.

"The frequency 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 familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a few times a month.

{Understanding