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In my young adulthood, I observed my grandmother through the pane of a coffee house. I felt dumbstruck – she had passed away the previous year. I looked intently for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd experienced comparable situations during my life. From time to time, I "knew" a person I didn't know. Sometimes I could quickly identify who the stranger reminded me of – like my elderly relative. In other instances, a face simply had a indistinct knowingness I couldn't place.

Exploring the Spectrum of Face Identification Capabilities

In recent times, I began questioning if others have these unusual situations. When I asked my acquaintances, one commented she regularly sees persons in unpredictable places who look recognizable. Others sometimes misidentify a unfamiliar individual or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some mentioned nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range of responses. Was it just longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? 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 interpret the same thing.

Comprehending the Range of Face Identification Skills

Scientists have created many assessments to quantify the ability to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often struggle to identify family, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also measure how skilled someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined 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 indication that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to remember old faces.

Taking Face Identification Tests

I felt intrigued whether these tests would provide insight on why strangers look recognizable. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a feeling that experts say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several face identification tests. I completed them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from three angles, then find it in arrays. During another test that told me to pick out famous people from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – similar to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my outcome. But after analysis of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "borderline super-recognizer".

Grasping Incorrect Identification Frequencies

I also performed well in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 black-and-white photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a series of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the original collection. The super-recognizer cutoff is roughly 80%; I recognized 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other side of the spectrum, people with prosopagnosia 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 metric, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my grandmother's?

Investigating Possible Reasons

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a comparatively extensive and high-resolution catalogue. We're also likely to individuate faces – that is, assign qualities to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and retain faces to permanent recall. While individuating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a similar air.

In moreover, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look closely at faces, I am inclined to notice the unknown person who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make face identification 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 range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. On the surface, this sounded like it could pertain to me. But the small number of reported cases all took place after a health incident such as a epileptic episode or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using tools like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

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

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

{Understanding