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During my young adulthood, I observed my elderly relative through the window of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the prior year. I stared for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd had comparable experiences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" an individual I had never met. At times I could quickly identify who the stranger resembled – for instance my grandmother. Other times, a countenance simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Examining the Variety of Person Recognition Abilities

Recently, I began questioning if different individuals have these peculiar encounters. When I inquired my friends, one commented she often sees persons in random places who look known. Others sometimes misidentify a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Range of Face Identification Capacities

Investigators have developed many evaluations to measure the capacity to recall faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to know kin, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I fall short. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the capacity to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for case, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Assessments

I felt interested whether these assessments would shed some light on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a sentiment that researchers say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, then find it in lineups. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after analysis of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the celebrity faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping False Alarm Percentages

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a string of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and indicate which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my performance, but also surprised. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but seldom misidentified a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unfamiliar individual's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Possible Reasons

It was proposed that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute characteristics to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Studies suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and commit faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was believed I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations 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" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all took place after a medical episode such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with possible HFF in long durations of study.

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

{Understanding