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In my twenties, I observed my elderly relative through the window of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the previous year. I gazed for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd had comparable occurrences all through my life. Periodically, I "recognized" a person I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could quickly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – like my elderly relative. In other instances, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Examining the Variety of Facial Recognition Experiences

Recently, I started wondering if different individuals have these peculiar situations. When I questioned my companions, one mentioned she frequently sees persons in unpredictable places who look known. Others sometimes confuse a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some described completely different responses – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of responses. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Scientists have developed many evaluations to assess the skill to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one side are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to know kin, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also measure how skilled someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recognize a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two capabilities use distinct brain functions; for instance, there is evidence that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Face Identification Tests

I felt interested whether these evaluations would offer understanding on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that researchers say is common for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed 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 – reminiscent to my everyday experience.

I felt uncertain about my outcome. But after analysis of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Rates

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a sequence of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a series of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the first set. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the old faces, but seldom misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Examining Possible Explanations

It was theorized that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but super-recognizers – and possibly near-exceptional individuals like me – have a comparatively extensive and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Research suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and commit faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know 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 elderly relative. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unknown people. Examining further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of reported cases all took place after a physical event such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy 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 face identification challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

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

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

{Understanding