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Throughout my mid-20s, I noticed my elderly relative through the window of a café. I felt stunned – she had died the prior year. I looked intently for a moment, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered comparable experiences during my life. From time to time, I "recognized" someone I was unacquainted with. At times I could rapidly pinpoint who the stranger reminded me of – like my grandmother. Other times, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Examining the Spectrum of Person Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I began questioning if different individuals have these peculiar experiences. When I inquired my companions, one said she frequently sees people in unexpected places who look familiar. Others sometimes mistake a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

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

Grasping the Continuum of Person Recognition Abilities

Investigators have designed many assessments to measure the capacity to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to identify family, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the skill to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain processes; for case, there is indication that super-recognizers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Evaluations

I felt interested whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that experts say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from three angles, then find it in arrays. During another test that told me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my actual experience.

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

Understanding False Alarm Rates

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the old faces, but seldom mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Investigating Potential Reasons

It was proposed that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and retain faces to enduring recollection. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention 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 inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who resembles my elderly relative. 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 tests helped me understand where I stood on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Researching further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could pertain 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 investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with possible HFF in many years of study.

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

{Understanding