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In my twenties, I spotted my elderly relative through the window of a coffee shop. I felt stunned – she had passed away the prior year. I gazed for a brief period, then reminded myself it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced analogous experiences during my life. Periodically, I "recognized" an individual I was unacquainted with. At times I could rapidly identify who the unknown individual looked like – like my grandma. In other instances, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't place.

Investigating the Range of Person Recognition Experiences

Lately, I started wondering if others have these unusual situations. When I inquired my acquaintances, one mentioned she regularly sees persons in random places who look known. Others at times misidentify a stranger or famous person for someone they know in real life. But some described no such experiences – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about 14 minutes 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.

Comprehending the Range of Face Identification Capacities

Investigators have developed many tests to quantify the skill to recall faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to identify relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also capture how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've looked at the ability to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain processes; for case, there is proof that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Taking Person Recognition Assessments

I felt interested 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 recognize me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that scientists say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

I was sent several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling stumped at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after evaluation of my performance, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding False Alarm Frequencies

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as particularly good for measuring someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a sequence of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the first set. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with face blindness accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also taken aback. I recognized many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers 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 elderly relative's?

Exploring Potential Reasons

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to learn and retain faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my elderly relative in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was believed I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the stranger who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat 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 known. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of recorded occurrences all occurred after a health incident such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with potential HFF in extended periods of investigation.

"The frequency 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 known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding