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During my mid-20s, I observed my grandma through the pane of a café. I felt stunned – she had passed away the prior year. I stared for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd had comparable situations during my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" someone I didn't know. Sometimes I could promptly identify who the stranger resembled – like my elderly relative. Other times, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Spectrum of Face Identification Capabilities

Lately, I started wondering if others have these peculiar situations. When I questioned my companions, one said she often sees persons in random places who look known. Others at times mistake a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some described completely different responses – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? 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 experience the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Face Identification Skills

Researchers have designed many tests to measure the capacity to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to know relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the skill to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain mechanisms; for example, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Face Identification Assessments

I felt interested whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why strangers look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that experts say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that directed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after assessment of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding False Alarm Rates

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they review a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Potential Causes

It was proposed that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, assign traits to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Research 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 elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I sat on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of reported cases all took place after a health incident such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in long durations of investigation.

"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 every face is familiar, and others, like me, who only undergo it a few times a month.

{Understanding