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

I'd had similar situations all through my life. Periodically, I "identified" a person I didn't know. Sometimes I could rapidly identify who the stranger resembled – like my elderly relative. On other occasions, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Examining the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Experiences

Lately, I began questioning if other people have these odd encounters. When I asked my acquaintances, one said she regularly sees individuals in unexpected places who look recognizable. Others occasionally mistake a unknown person or famous person for someone they know in actual life. But some reported nothing of the kind – they could easily recognize people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this diversity of experiences. Was it just desire that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of cognitive error? Research has found we spend about approximately 900 seconds of every hour looking at faces – do we just make mistakes sometimes? I was starting to understand that we can all see the same face but not interpret the same thing.

Grasping the Spectrum of Person Recognition Capacities

Scientists have created many tests to assess the ability to remember faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are exceptional facial identifiers, who remember faces they have seen only momentarily or a long time ago; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize family, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some evaluations also assess how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I think I fall short. But researchers "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've examined the ability to recognize a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two skills use separate brain mechanisms; for example, there is indication that superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to remember old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these evaluations would shed some light on why strangers look known. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often recognize people more than they remember me, and feel let down – a emotion that researchers say is typical for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I received several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the Cambridge Face Memory Test, I had to look at black-and-white photos of a face from different viewpoints, then find it in lineups. During another test that told 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 – comparable to my everyday experience.

I felt doubtful about my results. But after assessment of my results, I had accurately recognized 96% of the famous person faces. The finding was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding Mistaken Recognition Frequencies

I also excelled in the known/unknown countenances task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a sequence of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they examine a series of 120 analogous photos – the initial collection plus 60 new faces – and identify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier threshold is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the range, people with face blindness correctly guess an average of 57%.

I felt content with my performance, but also taken aback. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but seldom confused a new face for one that I'd seen before. My score on this indicator, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a incorrect identification frequency of about 30% on average. So why was I misidentifying a unknown person's face for my elderly relative's?

Examining Plausible Reasons

It was proposed that I likely possessed some superior face rememberer abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our recall, but exceptional facial identifiers – and likely borderline straddlers like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also possibly to differentiate visages – that is, attribute traits to each face, such as amiability or discourtesy. Research suggests that the latter helps people to develop and store faces to enduring recollection. While individuating may help me recognize people, it may also deceive me into seeing my grandmother in a woman who has a similar air.

In furthermore, 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 prone to notice the unfamiliar individual who resembles my grandmother. Indeed, one acquaintance who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes confessed she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching 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 "know" strangers. Examining further, I read about a condition called excessive facial recognition (HFF), in which unrecognized faces appear recognizable. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the few of documented instances all happened after a health incident such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the quirk that I've been experiencing my whole grown-up existence.

Through research sites, experts have heard from about 24,000 face-blind individuals, as well as people with all kinds of face identification problems, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be dissolving. Researchers study many of these people, using instruments like the old/new faces task and the memory for faces evaluation.

Experts have heard from only a few of people with possible HFF in extended periods of investigation.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think every face is familiar, and others, like me, who only undergo it a few times a month.

{Understanding