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Throughout my twenties, I spotted my elderly relative through the pane of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the previous year. I gazed for a moment, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd encountered analogous experiences during my life. Periodically, I "identified" a person I had never met. Sometimes I could promptly identify who the unknown individual reminded me of – such as my grandmother. Other times, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Range of Face Identification Experiences

In recent times, I started wondering if different individuals have these unusual situations. When I asked my companions, one said she frequently sees persons in random places who look familiar. Others at times confuse a stranger or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described nothing of the kind – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation 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 perceive the same thing.

Comprehending the Range of Person Recognition Capacities

Scientists have designed many evaluations to assess the ability to recall faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to identify kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But experts "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain processes; for case, there is proof that super-recognizers 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 Person Recognition Assessments

I felt interested whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that scientists say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after assessment of my results, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping False Alarm Percentages

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my result, but also surprised. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but infrequently mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Potential Reasons

It was proposed that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to acquire and retain faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the unfamiliar individual who similar to my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition 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 "know" strangers. Examining further, I read about a disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of documented instances all took place after a health incident such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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

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

{Understanding