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Throughout my mid-20s, I spotted my grandmother through the window of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the year before. I gazed for a moment, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered similar experiences during my life. Periodically, I "knew" an individual I was unacquainted with. Occasionally I could quickly pinpoint who the stranger reminded me of – like my grandma. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Examining the Variety of Face Identification Capabilities

Recently, I began questioning if others have these odd experiences. When I asked my friends, one mentioned she frequently sees individuals in random places who look known. Others occasionally mistake a unfamiliar individual or celebrity for someone they know in real life. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of perceptions. Was it just desire that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour 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 experience the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Facial Recognition Skills

Scientists have developed many evaluations to quantify the capacity to remember faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only for a short time or a distant past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often find it challenging to know relatives, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the ability to recall a face, according to brain researchers. It does seem that the two capabilities use separate brain functions; for example, there is evidence that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Assessments

I felt interested whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unknown people look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a feeling that researchers say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after analysis of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the celebrity faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a different face. Then they review a series of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and identify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recalled 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 previously seen countenances, but infrequently 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, superior face rememberers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Examining Possible Reasons

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and likely almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to individuate faces – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Studies suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and store faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In addition, it was thought I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a significant focus to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who similar to my grandmother. Indeed, one friend 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 sat on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "know" unfamiliar individuals. Investigating further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear familiar. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of reported cases all occurred after a health incident such as a seizure or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been observing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the known/unknown countenances task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with possible HFF in many years of study.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a continuum, with some people who think each countenance is known, and others, like me, who only undergo it a few times a month.

{Understanding