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In my mid-20s, I spotted my grandmother through the window of a coffee house. I felt astonished – she had died the prior year. I looked intently for a moment, then recalled it was impossible to be her.

I'd encountered analogous situations all through my life. Periodically, I "identified" someone I had never met. Occasionally I could quickly determine who the unknown individual reminded me of – such as my grandma. On other occasions, a visage simply had a subtle recognition I couldn't identify.

Investigating the Spectrum of Facial Recognition Capabilities

Recently, I began questioning if different individuals have these peculiar encounters. When I questioned my friends, one mentioned she frequently sees people in random places who look known. Others sometimes misidentify a stranger or public figure for someone they know in real life. But some reported 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 longing that made me see my grandmother that day – or some kind of mental glitch? Scientific investigation 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.

Grasping the Spectrum of Face Identification Capacities

Investigators have developed many assessments to measure the ability to recognize faces. There exists a wide range: at one side are super-recognizers, who recall faces they have seen only briefly or a considerable time past; at the other are people with facial agnosia, who often have difficulty to recognize relatives, intimate companions and even themselves.

Some tests also assess how good someone is at telling if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I am deficient. But scientists "just haven't dug into this" as much as they've studied the ability to remember a face, according to cognitive neuroscientists. It does seem that the two abilities use different brain processes; for instance, there is evidence that super-recognizers and those with facial agnosia do about as well as each other at recognizing new faces, despite their vastly dissimilar abilities to recall old faces.

Completing Person Recognition Evaluations

I felt intrigued whether these tests would provide insight on why unknown people look familiar. Was I someone who always remembers a face? I often recognize people more than they recognize me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that experts say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I over-recognize faces – to the extent that even some new faces look recognizable.

I obtained several person recognition tests. I waded through them, feeling puzzled at times. In one, called the memory for faces evaluation, I had to look at grayscale photos of a face from multiple perspectives, then find it in arrays. During another test that directed me to pick out celebrities from a mix of photos, many of the faces felt at least recognizable, but I couldn't quite place them – comparable to my real-life experience.

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

Grasping Mistaken Recognition Rates

I also performed well in the old/new faces task, which was described as notably useful for evaluating someone's recall for faces. The participant looks at a series of 60 grayscale photos, each of a separate face. Then they review a string of 120 similar photos – the original series plus 60 new faces – and indicate which were in the first set. 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 accurately identify an average of 57%.

I felt satisfied with my score, but also surprised. I recalled many of the previously seen countenances, but rarely misidentified a new face for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the incorrect identification frequency, was 18%. Typical rememberers, superior face rememberers and prosopagnosics all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I mistaking a stranger's face for my grandma's?

Investigating Plausible Reasons

It was proposed that I possibly possessed some exceptional facial identifier abilities. Everyone has a database of the faces we know in our memory, but superior face rememberers – and likely near-exceptional individuals like me – have a relatively large and detailed catalogue. We're also probably to differentiate visages – that is, attribute qualities to each face, such as approachability or rudeness. Research suggests that the second aspect helps people to develop and retain faces to permanent recall. While differentiating may help me recognize people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In addition, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more mistaken recognition moments, thinking they recognize someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who resembles my elderly relative. Indeed, one companion who said she doesn't make person recognition mistakes admitted she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Examining Excessive Recognition for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I sat on the continuum. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unfamiliar individuals. Researching further, I read about a disorder called hyperfamiliarity for faces (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear recognizable. On the surface, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the handful of recorded occurrences all occurred after a physical event such as a convulsion or stroke, unlike the peculiarity that I've been observing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 those with facial agnosia, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition difficulties, including sight abnormalities, 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 handful of people with suspected HFF in long durations of research.

"The frequency is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they hypothesized that there may be a range, with some people who think all visages is recognizable, and others, like me, who only experience it a few times a month.

{Understanding