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Throughout my mid-20s, I observed my grandma through the pane of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had departed the previous year. I looked intently for a moment, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had comparable situations all through my life. From time to time, I "knew" someone I didn't know. Occasionally I could quickly identify who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – for instance my elderly relative. In other instances, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Examining the Spectrum of Face Identification Experiences

Recently, I started wondering if other people have these odd encounters. When I questioned my companions, one mentioned she frequently sees people in unexpected places who look familiar. Others at times misidentify a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in actual life. But some described no such experiences – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this diversity of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Person Recognition Abilities

Investigators have developed many tests to measure the ability to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to know relatives, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I am deficient. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the skill to recall a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain mechanisms; for example, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a sentiment that experts say is frequent for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several facial recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from three angles, then find it in arrays. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my real-life experience.

I felt less than confident about my results. But after assessment of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding False Alarm Frequencies

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as particularly good for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they look through a string of 120 analogous photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the initial group. The super-recognizer threshold is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also surprised. I remembered many of the familiar visages, but seldom confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My result on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Possible Explanations

It was proposed that I probably possessed some super-recognizer capabilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but super-recognizers – and possibly borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and retain faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me recall people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was thought I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice 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 inclined to notice the unknown person who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make person 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 range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Examining further, I read about a condition called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of reported cases all occurred after a medical episode such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including visual distortions, 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 potential HFF in long durations of study.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a range, with some people who think every face is familiar, and others, like me, who only experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding