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Throughout my mid-20s, I spotted my elderly relative through the window of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the prior year. I stared for a short time, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced similar experiences all through my life. Periodically, I "identified" an individual I didn't know. Occasionally I could rapidly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – for instance my elderly relative. In other instances, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Variety of Face Identification Abilities

Lately, I started wondering if different individuals have these unusual encounters. When I questioned my acquaintances, one commented she often sees people in unexpected places who look familiar. Others occasionally misidentify a stranger or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range 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 approximately 900 seconds 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 Person Recognition Skills

Investigators have designed many assessments to measure the skill to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side 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 have difficulty to know kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments 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 "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to remember a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain functions; for case, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that scientists say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from three angles, 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 precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after assessment of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping False Alarm Frequencies

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a string of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also surprised. I remembered many of the old faces, but seldom mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Potential Causes

It was proposed that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and retain faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity 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 "identify" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of reported cases all took place after a physical event such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of study.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think every face is familiar, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding