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In my young adulthood, I observed my grandmother through the window of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had departed the prior year. I gazed for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered similar occurrences throughout my life. From time to time, I "knew" an individual I was unacquainted with. At times I could promptly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – like my grandma. Other times, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Range of Facial Recognition Capabilities

In recent times, I began questioning if other people have these peculiar experiences. When I inquired my friends, one mentioned she frequently sees persons in unexpected places who look familiar. Others sometimes confuse a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some reported completely different responses – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research 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 perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

Scientists have developed many evaluations to quantify the skill to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to identify kin, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the ability to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain mechanisms; for case, there is indication that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Face Identification Tests

I felt curious whether these tests would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often remember people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that scientists say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful 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 "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the first set. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Potential Reasons

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and commit faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of reported cases all happened after a health incident such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. 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 many years of investigation.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think each countenance is recognizable, and others, like me, who only experience it a few times a month.

{Understanding