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In my mid-20s, I noticed my elderly relative through the pane of a café. I felt dumbstruck – she had died the previous year. I gazed for a brief period, then recalled it couldn't be her.

I'd encountered similar situations throughout my life. Periodically, I "recognized" someone I didn't know. Sometimes I could rapidly determine who the unfamiliar person looked like – such as my elderly relative. In other instances, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't recognize.

Exploring the Range of Facial Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I began questioning if different individuals have these peculiar encounters. When I inquired my acquaintances, one said she regularly sees people in random places who look familiar. Others occasionally misidentify a stranger or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. 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 diversity of perceptions. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Scientific investigation has found we spend about a quarter-hour of every hour looking at faces – do we just err sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Understanding the Continuum of Person Recognition Skills

Investigators have created many tests to measure the skill to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are super-recognizers, who remember faces they have seen only for a short time or a considerable time past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often find it challenging to know kin, dear acquaintances 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 think I have limitations. But scientists "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the ability to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use different brain mechanisms; for example, there is evidence that exceptional facial identifiers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recognize old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Tests

I felt intrigued whether these evaluations would shed some light on why unknown people look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that scientists say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several facial recognition 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 different viewpoints, then find it in groups. 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 quite place them – similar to my everyday experience.

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

Comprehending False Alarm Rates

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recognition for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they look through a sequence of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and specify 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 end of the continuum, people with prosopagnosia properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my performance, but also astonished. 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 mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Possible Explanations

It was suggested that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and possibly almost superior rememberers like me – have a relatively large and high-resolution catalogue. We're also possibly to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe qualities to each face, such as friendliness or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to learn and retain faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also trick me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In moreover, it was considered I might be "a attentive countenance examiner", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look carefully at faces, I am inclined to notice the stranger who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Excessive Recognition for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I positioned on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "recognize" strangers. Investigating further, I read about a syndrome called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unknown faces appear known. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all occurred after a medical episode such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been noticing my whole adult life.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition difficulties, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

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

"The prevalence 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 recognizable, and others, like me, who only experience it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding