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Throughout my young adulthood, I spotted my grandmother through the glass of a coffee house. I felt stunned – she had departed the previous year. I gazed for a short time, then reminded myself it couldn't be her.

I'd experienced analogous occurrences all through my life. Periodically, I "knew" a person I didn't know. Occasionally I could promptly pinpoint who the stranger looked like – like my grandma. On other occasions, a visage simply had a vague familiarity I couldn't place.

Examining the Spectrum of Person Recognition Experiences

Recently, I started wondering if other people have these unusual situations. When I questioned my companions, one commented she often sees individuals in random places who look recognizable. Others sometimes mistake a unknown person or celebrity for someone they know in everyday existence. But some reported no such experiences – they could easily identify people they'd met and people they hadn't.

I felt intrigued by this range 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 approximately 900 seconds 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 Range of Person Recognition Skills

Scientists have developed many assessments to assess the skill to recognize faces. There exists a broad spectrum: at one extreme are exceptional facial identifiers, who recognize faces they have seen only momentarily or a distant past; at the other are people with face blindness, who often struggle to identify kin, close friends and even themselves.

Some assessments also assess how good someone is at recognizing if they have not seen a face before. This is where I suspect I have limitations. But researchers "haven't extensively researched 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 functions; for instance, there is indication that exceptional facial identifiers and prosopagnosics do about as well as each other at discerning new faces, despite their extremely distinct abilities to recall old faces.

Undergoing Facial Recognition Assessments

I felt curious whether these tests would offer understanding on why strangers look familiar. Was I someone who constantly recalls a face? I often remember people more than they remember me, and feel disappointed – a sentiment that scientists say is frequent for super-recognizers. But maybe I excessively identify faces – to the extent that even some new faces look familiar.

I received several facial recognition tests. I completed them, feeling confused at times. In one, called the facial recall assessment, I had to look at monochrome photos of a face from three angles, 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 precisely recognize them – comparable to my actual experience.

I felt uncertain about my performance. But after assessment of my results, I had properly distinguished 96% of the famous person faces. The determination was that I qualified as a "near-exceptional facial identifier".

Understanding False Alarm Frequencies

I also did exceptionally in the previously seen/unfamiliar faces task, which was described as notably useful for assessing someone's memory for faces. The test-taker looks at a series of 60 monochrome photos, each of a distinct face. Then they review a series of 120 similar photos – the first group plus 60 unknown visages – and specify which were in the initial group. The exceptional facial identifier cutoff is roughly 80%; I recalled 78% of the faces I'd seen. On the other extreme of the spectrum, people with face blindness properly recognize an average of 57%.

I felt pleased with my score, but also astonished. I recognized many of the familiar visages, but rarely confused a unknown visage for one that I'd seen before. My performance on this measure, called the false alarm rate, was 18%. Typical rememberers, exceptional facial identifiers and face-blind individuals all have a false alarm rate of about 30% on average. So why was I confusing a unfamiliar individual's face for my grandmother's?

Exploring Potential Causes

It was theorized that I probably possessed some superior face rememberer capacities. Everyone has a catalogue of the faces we know in our recall, but superior face rememberers – and probably near-exceptional individuals like me – have a fairly substantial and precise catalogue. We're also likely to distinguish countenances – that is, ascribe traits to each face, such as amiability or rudeness. Research suggests that the latter helps people to acquire and store faces to enduring recollection. While differentiating may help me remember people, it may also mislead me into seeing my grandma in a woman who has a analogous presence.

In furthermore, it was believed I might be "an engaged facial observer", meaning I pay a considerable notice to faces. Others may have more false alarm moments, thinking they know someone they don't know. But because I tend to look attentively at faces, I am disposed to notice the unfamiliar individual who looks like my grandmother. Indeed, one friend who said she doesn't make face identification mistakes acknowledged she doesn't really look at the people around her.

Researching Hyperfamiliarity for Faces

These tests helped me understand where I stood on the range. But I wanted to understand more about what is happening in the brain when we "identify" unknown people. Investigating further, I read about a condition called over-familiarity with countenances (HFF), in which unfamiliar faces appear known. Superficially, this sounded like it could relate to me. But the small number of documented instances all occurred after a health incident such as a convulsion or cerebral accident, unlike the idiosyncrasy that I've been observing my whole mature years.

Through investigative websites, experts have heard from about 24,000 prosopagnosics, as well as people with all kinds of facial recognition challenges, including visual distortions, like when faces appear to be melting. 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 small number of people with suspected HFF in many years of study.

"The occurrence rate is quite low," one expert said of HFF. However, they theorized that there may be a spectrum, with some people who think every face is recognizable, and others, like me, who only undergo it a several occasions a month.

{Understanding