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Throughout my twenties, I noticed my grandma through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had departed the prior year. I gazed for a moment, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd experienced analogous situations during my life. Periodically, I "identified" a person I had never met. Sometimes I could rapidly determine who the unfamiliar person resembled – for instance my grandmother. In other instances, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Variety of Face Identification Experiences

In recent times, I began questioning if others have these unusual experiences. When I asked my companions, one commented she frequently sees people in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others sometimes misidentify a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described no such experiences – they could effortlessly distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Person Recognition Abilities

Researchers have developed many assessments to quantify the ability to recognize 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 prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I have limitations. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain functions; for instance, there is evidence that superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Face Identification Evaluations

I felt interested whether these assessments would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that scientists say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that directed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after evaluation of my results, I had correctly identified 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Understanding False Alarm Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a series of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the original collection. The superior face rememberer threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with facial agnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt content with my score, but also surprised. I recognized many of the old faces, but rarely confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person'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 memory, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as approachability or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to learn and store faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice 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 stranger who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" strangers. Researching further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of documented instances all took place after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity 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 face identification challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with potential HFF in long durations of study.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a continuum, with some people who think every face is recognizable, and others, like me, who only encounter it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding