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In my twenties, I noticed my grandma through the window of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had passed away the previous year. I stared for a moment, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd had analogous occurrences throughout my life. From time to time, I "identified" someone I didn't know. Occasionally I could quickly identify who the unfamiliar person resembled – for instance my grandmother. In other instances, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Range of Facial Recognition Experiences

Lately, I started wondering if others have these peculiar situations. When I inquired my acquaintances, one said she regularly sees persons in unexpected places who look familiar. Others sometimes misidentify a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described no such experiences – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of responses. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma 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 make mistakes sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Range of Facial Recognition Skills

Investigators have developed many tests to measure the skill to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who recall faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to know family, 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 have limitations. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the ability to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain mechanisms; for example, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these tests would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that scientists say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several person recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in arrays. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after analysis of my results, I had correctly identified 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding False Alarm Percentages

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The subject looks at a collection of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a string of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify 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 continuum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also taken aback. I remembered many of the old faces, but seldom mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this indicator, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers 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 grandma's?

Exploring Possible Causes

It was theorized that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and retain faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Examining further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the few of reported cases all took place after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of research.

"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 multiple instances a month.

{Understanding