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Throughout my mid-20s, I spotted my elderly relative through the window of a café. I felt astonished – she had died the year before. I stared for a brief period, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered comparable occurrences all through my life. From time to time, I "recognized" an individual I didn't know. At times I could promptly identify who the unknown individual resembled – for instance my elderly relative. In other instances, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Examining the Variety of Person Recognition Abilities

Recently, I started wondering if others have these odd encounters. When I questioned my friends, one said she often sees persons in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others at times confuse a stranger or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some described no such experiences – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma 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 experience the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Face Identification Skills

Researchers have designed many assessments to measure the capacity to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to identify relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the capacity to remember a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain functions; for case, there is indication 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 remember old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Tests

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 remember people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that researchers say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point 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 memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that directed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after evaluation of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping False Alarm Frequencies

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a sequence of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also surprised. I recognized many of the old faces, but seldom mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Plausible Explanations

It was proposed that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and store faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the unfamiliar individual 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 Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of documented instances all took place after a medical episode such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of face identification challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

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

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

{Understanding