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In my mid-20s, I noticed my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had passed away the year before. I looked intently for a moment, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced analogous situations throughout my life. Periodically, I "knew" an individual I had never met. At times I could quickly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – such as my elderly relative. In other instances, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Examining the Variety of Face Identification Experiences

Recently, I started wondering if others have these odd experiences. When I inquired my acquaintances, one commented she frequently sees individuals in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others occasionally confuse a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some described no such experiences – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of perceptions. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Facial Recognition Skills

Investigators have created many evaluations to measure the skill to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often find it challenging to know relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the skill to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain functions; for example, there is evidence that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that experts say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several facial recognition tests. I worked 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 arrays. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after assessment of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Grasping False Alarm Percentages

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a series of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier threshold 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 satisfied with my performance, but also surprised. I recognized many of the old faces, but seldom misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Exploring Possible Reasons

It was theorized that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to develop and commit faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", 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 attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of reported cases all happened after a physical event such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with potential HFF in many years of research.

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

{Understanding