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Throughout my mid-20s, I observed my grandmother through the glass of a coffee shop. I felt astonished – she had died the year before. I looked intently for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered analogous situations throughout my life. Occasionally, I "knew" someone I had never met. Occasionally I could quickly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – such as my grandmother. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Examining the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capabilities

In recent times, I began questioning if different individuals have these unusual encounters. When I questioned my acquaintances, one mentioned she frequently sees individuals in unexpected places who look familiar. Others occasionally misidentify a stranger or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned no such experiences – they could easily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about 14 minutes 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 Continuum of Person Recognition Abilities

Investigators have designed many evaluations to quantify the skill to recall faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to know kin, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the skill to recognize a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain functions; for case, there is indication that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Face Identification Tests

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would shed some light on why strangers look known. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a sentiment that scientists say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed 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 – reminiscent to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after analysis of my scores, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "almost superior face rememberer".

Comprehending Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's recognition for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a series of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unknown visages – and indicate which were in the first set. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the old faces, but seldom mistook a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, 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 stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Possible Causes

It was proposed that I likely possessed some exceptional facial identifier capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, assign traits to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and retain faces to long-term memory. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the stranger who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" strangers. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the few of documented instances all took place after a physical event such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing 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 person recognition problems, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with suspected HFF in many years of research.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a continuum, with some people who think every face is familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a few times a month.

{Understanding