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In my mid-20s, I noticed my grandma through the window of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the previous year. I gazed for a short time, then remembered it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered similar occurrences during my life. Occasionally, I "identified" an individual I had never met. Sometimes I could rapidly pinpoint who the stranger reminded me of – for instance my grandma. Other times, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Examining the Variety of Person Recognition Capabilities

In recent times, I started wondering if others have these odd encounters. When I asked my companions, one commented she frequently sees persons in random places who look known. Others occasionally confuse a stranger or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some described nothing of the kind – they could readily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this range of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my elderly relative that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Research has found we spend about 14 minutes of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not perceive the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Facial Recognition Abilities

Researchers have developed many evaluations to quantify the capacity to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: 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 struggle to identify kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also capture how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe I fall short. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've looked at the capacity to recall a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use separate brain functions; for instance, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Facial Recognition Tests

I felt intrigued whether these tests would provide insight on why unfamiliar individuals look recognizable. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they recall me, and feel disappointed – a emotion that scientists say is common for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I hyper-recognize faces – to the degree that even some new faces look known.

I was sent several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, 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 exactly identify them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my performance. But after evaluation of my scores, I had accurately recognized 96% of the celebrity faces. The conclusion 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 particularly good for assessing someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a string of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the continuum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my result, but also surprised. I remembered many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this metric, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Normal recognizers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Potential Explanations

It was theorized that I likely possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and probably borderline straddlers like me – have a fairly substantial and high-resolution catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to develop and store faces to long-term memory. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In addition, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they identify someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I stood on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear familiar. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of documented instances all happened after a medical episode such as a seizure or cerebral accident, unlike the peculiarity that I've been noticing 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 challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the facial recall assessment.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with potential HFF in long durations of study.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a range, with some people who think all visages is recognizable, and others, like me, who only undergo it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding