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In my twenties, I observed my grandmother through the pane of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had died the year before. I stared for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered comparable experiences all through my life. Periodically, I "recognized" an individual I had never met. At times I could promptly identify who the unfamiliar person looked like – such as my elderly relative. On other occasions, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Spectrum of Face Identification Experiences

Lately, I began questioning if others have these peculiar encounters. When I questioned my acquaintances, one mentioned she often sees individuals in unpredictable places who look known. Others sometimes mistake a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described nothing of the kind – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Person Recognition Abilities

Scientists have developed many assessments to quantify the skill to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to recognize relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But researchers "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the ability to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain functions; for example, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt interested whether these evaluations would provide insight on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that researchers say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that instructed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after assessment of my performance, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Rates

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a string of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also astonished. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but rarely mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Potential Explanations

It was theorized that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or discourtesy. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to develop and store faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Researching further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of documented instances all occurred after a physical event such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole adult life.

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

Experts have heard from only a few of people with potential HFF in long durations of investigation.

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

{Understanding