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Throughout my mid-20s, I observed my grandma through the window of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the previous year. I looked intently for a short time, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had similar occurrences during my life. From time to time, I "knew" a person I had never met. Occasionally I could rapidly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – such as my grandma. In other instances, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Spectrum of Person Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I started wondering if other people have these odd encounters. When I questioned my friends, one commented she regularly sees individuals in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others at times confuse a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some described no such experiences – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capacities

Researchers have created many assessments to quantify the capacity to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to know family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for example, there is indication that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Tests

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a feeling that researchers say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I waded through 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 lineups. During another test that told me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after analysis of my results, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Rates

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a series of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the old faces, but seldom misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Possible Explanations

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and likely near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and commit faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition 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 "know" strangers. Researching further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of documented instances all happened after a medical episode such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

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

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a range, with some people who think each countenance is recognizable, and others, like me, who only encounter it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding