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During my twenties, I observed my elderly relative through the pane of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the year before. I gazed for a moment, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered analogous experiences throughout my life. Periodically, I "identified" an individual I didn't know. Sometimes I could quickly determine who the unknown individual looked like – like my grandmother. In other instances, a countenance simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Spectrum of Person Recognition Experiences

In recent times, I became curious if others have these odd situations. When I questioned my acquaintances, one said she often sees persons in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others at times misidentify a unknown person or public figure for someone they know in actual life. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could readily distinguish people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just longing that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research 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.

Grasping the Continuum of Facial Recognition Capacities

Researchers have developed many tests to assess the ability to recall faces. There exists a extensive variety: at one end are superior face rememberers, who recall faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to know kin, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But scientists "haven't extensively researched this" as much as they've examined the ability to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain functions; for case, there is proof that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recognize old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a feeling that experts say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look recognizable.

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

I felt doubtful about my performance. But after evaluation of my performance, I had properly distinguished 96% of the public figure faces. The conclusion was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Percentages

I also performed well in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for assessing someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they look through a series of 120 similar photos – the initial collection plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – 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 end of the continuum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also surprised. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but infrequently misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this measure, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Normal recognizers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Potential Explanations

It was suggested that I likely possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a comparatively extensive and precise catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Research suggests that the later element helps people to acquire and retain faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also trick 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 significant focus to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who similar to my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These assessments helped me understand where I positioned on the spectrum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unknown people. Researching further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unknown faces appear recognizable. Initially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all occurred after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing 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 face identification difficulties, including perceptual alterations, like when faces appear to be melting. 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 handful of people with possible HFF in extended periods of investigation.

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

{Understanding