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During my mid-20s, I spotted my elderly relative through the glass of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had died the year before. I looked intently for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced comparable occurrences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" someone I didn't know. Sometimes I could quickly determine who the unknown individual resembled – such as my elderly relative. In other instances, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Examining the Range of Face Identification Capabilities

Lately, I began questioning if different individuals have these odd situations. When I asked my friends, one mentioned she regularly sees individuals in random places who look recognizable. Others sometimes confuse a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Grasping the Range of Facial Recognition Skills

Scientists have created many evaluations to assess the capacity to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the ability to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain functions; for example, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Tests

I felt interested whether these tests would shed some light on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a emotion that researchers say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in lineups. During another test that directed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after analysis of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending False Alarm Percentages

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and specify which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the old faces, but rarely mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Potential Causes

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, assign characteristics to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and retain faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify 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 grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted 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 continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of documented instances all took place after a medical episode such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, 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 Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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

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

{Understanding