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Throughout my young adulthood, I spotted my elderly relative through the pane of a café. I felt stunned – she had passed away the year before. I stared for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had comparable occurrences throughout my life. Occasionally, I "recognized" a person I didn't know. At times I could promptly pinpoint who the unfamiliar person looked like – such as my grandmother. On other occasions, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Range of Facial Recognition Capabilities

Lately, I started wondering if others have these odd situations. When I inquired my friends, one mentioned she often sees persons in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others at times confuse a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could readily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this diversity of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds 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 interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Continuum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Scientists have developed many tests to quantify the skill to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to identify family, dear acquaintances and even themselves.

Some tests also capture how proficient someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've examined the skill to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use distinct brain processes; for example, there is proof that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Completing Facial Recognition Tests

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would offer understanding on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they recognize me, and feel let down – a emotion that experts say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several face identification tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't quite place them – similar to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my results. But after assessment of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the public figure faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Understanding False Alarm Frequencies

I also excelled in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as especially effective for evaluating someone's memory for faces. The subject looks at a sequence of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 analogous photos – the original series plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the range, people with facial agnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt content with my result, but also surprised. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but rarely mistook a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Average identifiers, exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Plausible Reasons

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as friendliness or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and commit faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", meaning I pay a significant focus 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 prone to notice the stranger who resembles my grandma. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I positioned on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of documented instances all took place after a health incident such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been experiencing 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 difficulties, including sight abnormalities, 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 few of people with potential HFF in many years of research.

"The prevalence is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they speculated that there may be a range, with some people who think all visages is familiar, and others, like me, who only encounter it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding