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During my twenties, I noticed my elderly relative through the window of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had died the prior year. I looked intently for a brief period, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced comparable experiences during my life. Periodically, I "recognized" a person I didn't know. Sometimes I could promptly identify who the stranger looked like – for instance my elderly relative. Other times, a face simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't recognize.

Investigating the Variety of Face Identification Experiences

Recently, I began questioning if different individuals have these peculiar situations. When I inquired my acquaintances, one said she often sees individuals in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others occasionally misidentify a stranger or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Scientific investigation has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Understanding the Range of Facial Recognition Capacities

Researchers have developed many assessments to assess the skill to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with prosopagnosia, who often have difficulty to identify family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some evaluations also measure how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But researchers "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've studied the skill to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two capabilities use different brain functions; for case, there is indication that super-recognizers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt curious whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that experts say is frequent for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, 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 known, but I couldn't exactly identify them – similar to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after evaluation of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping False Alarm Percentages

I also did exceptionally in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and specify 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 range, people with prosopagnosia accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also surprised. I recognized many of the old faces, but infrequently mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Potential Explanations

It was theorized that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but exceptional facial identifiers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and store faces to long-term memory. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who resembles my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I sat on the spectrum. 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 unknown 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 brain attack, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. 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 handful of people with suspected HFF in extended periods of investigation.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated 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