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During my mid-20s, I spotted my grandmother through the window of a coffee shop. I felt dumbstruck – she had departed the prior year. I looked intently for a brief period, then remembered it couldn't possibly be her.

I'd had analogous occurrences during my life. Occasionally, I "identified" an individual I was unacquainted with. Sometimes I could rapidly identify who the unfamiliar person reminded me of – such as my grandmother. On other occasions, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Examining the Spectrum of Face Identification Experiences

In recent times, I became curious if others have these peculiar situations. When I asked my acquaintances, one commented she frequently sees persons in unexpected places who look known. Others occasionally mistake a unfamiliar individual or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some described completely different responses – they could effortlessly identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt fascinated by this range of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my grandma that day – or some kind of brain malfunction? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was commencing to comprehend that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Face Identification Skills

Researchers have developed many evaluations to quantify the capacity to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one side are superior face rememberers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often have difficulty to know family, close friends and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I believe 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 abilities use distinct brain functions; for example, there is proof that exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recognize old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Tests

I felt intrigued whether these assessments would shed some light on why unfamiliar individuals look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they recall me, and feel let down – a feeling that researchers say is common for superior face rememberers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the degree that even some new faces look familiar.

I obtained several face identification tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least known, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – reminiscent to my actual experience.

I felt less than confident about my outcome. But after analysis of my scores, I had correctly identified 96% of the public figure faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as particularly good for assessing someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a collection of 60 grayscale photos, each of a distinct face. Then they examine a sequence of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier benchmark is roughly 80%; I remembered 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other end of the spectrum, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also astonished. I remembered many of the old faces, but rarely confused a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My result on this metric, called the mistaken recognition percentage, was 18%. Typical rememberers, super-recognizers and face-blind individuals all have a mistaken recognition percentage of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Plausible Causes

It was suggested that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recollection, but superior face rememberers – and probably almost superior rememberers like me – have a fairly substantial and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to distinguish countenances – that is, assign traits to each face, such as amiability or impoliteness. Scientific investigation suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and retain faces to permanent recall. While distinguishing may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In furthermore, it was considered I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a lot of attention to faces. Others may have more incorrect identification moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am prone to notice the unknown person who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Over-familiarity 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. Examining further, I read about a syndrome called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the handful of documented instances all took place after a physical event such as a seizure or brain attack, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole adult life.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of face identification challenges, including sight abnormalities, like when faces appear to be melting. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a handful of people with potential HFF in many years of study.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think each countenance is familiar, and others, like me, who only undergo it a multiple instances a month.

{Understanding