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During my twenties, I spotted my grandma through the glass of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the year before. I looked intently for a short time, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced analogous experiences during my life. From time to time, I "identified" an individual I didn't know. Sometimes I could promptly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – like my grandmother. In other instances, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Range of Face Identification Capabilities

In recent times, I began questioning if other people have these unusual encounters. When I inquired my acquaintances, one mentioned she regularly sees persons in unexpected places who look known. Others sometimes misidentify a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some described nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes 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 Spectrum of Person Recognition Skills

Scientists have created many evaluations to assess the ability to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to identify relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain functions; for case, there is evidence that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt interested whether these tests would offer understanding on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that scientists say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in arrays. 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 exactly identify them – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after analysis of my results, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Comprehending Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also astonished. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Examining Plausible Causes

It was theorized that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to learn and store faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who resembles my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of reported cases all occurred after a health incident such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition problems, including sight abnormalities, 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 few of people with potential HFF in long durations of investigation.

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

{Understanding