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During my young adulthood, I spotted my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had passed away the year before. I stared for a short time, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had analogous situations throughout my life. From time to time, I "identified" someone I had never met. At times I could quickly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – like my grandmother. Other times, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Lately, I began questioning if different individuals have these peculiar situations. When I asked my friends, one commented she often sees individuals in unexpected places who look known. Others occasionally confuse a stranger or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some reported no such experiences – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds 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 perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Researchers have designed many evaluations to quantify the skill to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to recognize family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain functions; for case, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Assessments

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

I obtained several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, 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 famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

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

Grasping Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a string of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also astonished. I recalled many of the old faces, but seldom misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a stranger's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Plausible Causes

It was theorized that I likely possessed some super-recognizer 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 possibly to individuate faces – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. 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 mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of reported cases all happened after a medical episode such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole mature years.

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

Experts have heard from only a few of people with suspected HFF in many years of study.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a range, with some people who think every face is familiar, and others, like me, who only undergo it a few times a month.

{Understanding