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In my mid-20s, I observed my grandma through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had departed the year before. I stared for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd had similar situations during my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" a person I didn't know. Sometimes I could quickly determine who the unfamiliar person resembled – for instance my elderly relative. In other instances, a face simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Range of Face Identification Experiences

Lately, I started wondering if other people have these odd encounters. When I questioned my companions, one commented she frequently sees people in unexpected places who look familiar. Others at times misidentify a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned completely different responses – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

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

Understanding the Spectrum of Person Recognition Abilities

Researchers have developed many tests to quantify the ability to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one end are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to recognize relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the skill to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain functions; for instance, there is indication that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Tests

I felt intrigued whether these tests would offer understanding on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a emotion that researchers 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 facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in lineups. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't exactly identify them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after assessment of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Comprehending False Alarm Rates

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a series of 120 comparable photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the first set. The superior face rememberer cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also astonished. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but rarely 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 face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Possible Explanations

It was proposed that I probably possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to learn and commit faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the unknown person who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity 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 "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of documented instances all occurred after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole mature years.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

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

"The prevalence 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 experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding