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Throughout my young adulthood, I noticed my elderly relative through the window of a café. I felt astonished – she had died the prior year. I stared for a short time, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had similar occurrences during my life. Periodically, I "identified" someone I didn't know. Occasionally I could promptly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person looked like – such as my grandmother. Other times, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Range of Facial Recognition Experiences

Recently, I became curious if others have these unusual situations. When I asked my companions, one mentioned she frequently sees people in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others occasionally confuse a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some reported completely different responses – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Research has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

Researchers have designed many assessments to measure the ability to recognize faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to identify family, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how good someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But experts "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use different brain processes; for example, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Tests

I felt intrigued whether these tests would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that experts say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I received several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped 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 public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after analysis of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's recall 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 series of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the previously seen countenances, 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, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Potential Causes

It was suggested that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to develop and store faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of reported cases all occurred after a medical episode such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification 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 possible HFF in long durations of research.

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

{Understanding