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In my young adulthood, I observed my grandmother through the window of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the prior year. I gazed for a short time, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced analogous experiences during my life. Periodically, I "recognized" an individual I didn't know. Occasionally I could rapidly determine who the stranger resembled – such as my grandma. In other instances, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Range of Facial Recognition Abilities

Recently, I began questioning if other people have these unusual situations. When I questioned my acquaintances, one commented she often sees people in random places who look recognizable. Others occasionally confuse a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Person Recognition Capacities

Scientists have created many assessments to quantify the capacity to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often struggle to identify kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the ability to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain processes; for instance, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Face Identification Tests

I felt interested whether these evaluations would shed some light on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that experts say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after assessment of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping False Alarm Percentages

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and identify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Plausible Causes

It was theorized that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to differentiate visages – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and commit faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations 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" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of documented instances all happened after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with possible HFF in extended periods of research.

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

{Understanding