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Throughout my young adulthood, I observed my grandma through the window of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the prior year. I looked intently for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced similar occurrences during my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" an individual I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could rapidly pinpoint who the unknown individual reminded me of – like my grandma. In other instances, a visage simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Recently, I became curious if others have these odd experiences. When I inquired my acquaintances, one mentioned she often sees persons in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others sometimes misidentify a unfamiliar individual or celebrity 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 intrigued by this range of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? 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.

Grasping the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Skills

Scientists have created many evaluations to measure the capacity to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to recognize family, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how proficient someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain functions; for example, there is indication that super-recognizers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt curious whether these assessments would shed some light on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that scientists say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in lineups. During another test that told me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after evaluation of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a series of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the range, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but seldom confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Potential Reasons

It was theorized that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, assign traits to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and retain faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification 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 looks like my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of documented instances all happened after a medical episode such as a convulsion or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential 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 continuum, with some people who think each countenance is recognizable, and others, like me, who only experience it a few times a month.

{Understanding