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During my mid-20s, I noticed my grandma through the window of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had departed the year before. I stared for a brief period, then remembered it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered analogous experiences throughout my life. Periodically, I "knew" someone I had never met. At times I could rapidly identify who the stranger looked like – like my elderly relative. Other times, a countenance simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't identify.

Exploring the Variety of Face Identification Experiences

Recently, I started wondering if others have these peculiar encounters. When I inquired my companions, one said she often sees individuals in unpredictable places who look familiar. Others at times confuse a stranger or public figure for someone they know in everyday existence. But some described nothing of the kind – they could effortlessly recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt curious by this spectrum of experiences. Was it just yearning that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Studies has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just have inaccuracies sometimes? I was beginning to realize that we can all see the same face but not experience the same thing.

Grasping the Continuum of Person Recognition Skills

Researchers have created many evaluations to assess the skill to remember faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one end are super-recognizers, who recognize faces they have seen only briefly or a long time ago; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to recognize family, close friends and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how skilled someone is at determining if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I am deficient. But experts "haven't thoroughly investigated this" as much as they've studied the capacity to recall a face, according to neuroscience experts. It does seem that the two skills use distinct brain functions; for case, there is evidence that super-recognizers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at identifying new faces, despite their wildly different abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Face Identification Tests

I felt intrigued whether these tests would shed some light on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who never forgets a face? I often recall people more than they remember me, and feel disheartened – a sentiment that experts say is typical for exceptional facial identifiers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the point that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several facial recognition tests. I worked through them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in groups. During another test that instructed me to pick out public figures from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least familiar, but I couldn't precisely recognize them – comparable to my everyday experience.

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

Understanding False Alarm Frequencies

I also excelled in the old/new faces task, which was described as especially effective for measuring someone's recall for faces. The subject looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a different face. Then they review a series of 120 comparable photos – the first group plus 60 unfamiliar countenances – and specify which were in the original collection. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I remembered 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 satisfied with my score, but also surprised. I recognized many of the old faces, but infrequently mistook a unfamiliar countenance for one that I'd seen before. My score on this indicator, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Normal recognizers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Exploring Plausible Reasons

It was suggested that I possibly possessed some super-recognizer capacities. Everyone has a inventory of the faces we know in our memory, but super-recognizers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and precise catalogue. We're also probably to individuate faces – that is, ascribe characteristics to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Scientific investigation suggests that the second aspect helps people to learn and commit faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me recall people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a comparable demeanor.

In moreover, it was thought I might be "an active face perceiver", 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 inclined to notice the unknown person who looks like my grandma. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make facial recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Investigating Over-familiarity for Faces

These evaluations helped me understand where I stood 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 disorder called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unknown faces appear familiar. Initially, this sounded like it could apply to me. But the small number of documented instances all happened after a physical event such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole grown-up existence.

Through scientific platforms, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of person recognition challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be liquefying. Researchers study many of these people, using methods like the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task and the Cambridge Face Memory Test.

Experts have heard from only a small number of people with possible 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 known, and others, like me, who only experience it a few times a month.

{Understanding