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During my young adulthood, I spotted my grandma through the glass of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had departed the year before. I stared for a brief period, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd had analogous experiences during my life. Periodically, I "identified" an individual I didn't know. Sometimes I could rapidly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – such as my elderly relative. On other occasions, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

In recent times, I began questioning if other people have these odd situations. When I questioned my companions, one mentioned she often sees persons in unexpected places who look familiar. Others occasionally mistake a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this spectrum of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? 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 interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Person Recognition Capacities

Scientists have designed many tests to assess the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to recognize relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how proficient someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've looked at the ability to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain processes; for instance, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Tests

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

I obtained several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my actual experience.

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

Grasping False Alarm Rates

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for measuring someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a series of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the continuum, people with facial agnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but seldom misidentified a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandma's?

Examining Potential Reasons

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, assign traits to each face, such as approachability or discourtesy. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and commit faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a disorder called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of recorded occurrences all happened after a physical event such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification difficulties, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the old/new faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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

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

{Understanding