Lifeless objects are watching you everywhere. New study explains why they won’t give up

When you see a face in a cloud, in the slits of an electrical outlet, or on the side of a house, there is a term for it: face pareidolia. This strange phenomenon of perception gives inanimate and lifeless objects facial features – the basic shapes of two eyes and a mouth are often enough to imagine a face looking at you.

This common occurrence can be seen wherever we confuse these rudimentary facial features: even galactic-scale phenomena can cause us to do the same strange double take.

“This basic pattern of characteristics that defines the human face is something our brains are particularly sensitive to, and is probably what draws our attention to pareidolia objects,” says behavioral neuroscientist Colin Palmer of the University of New South Wales (UNSW). in Australia.

“But facial perception is not just about noticing the presence of a face. We also need to recognize who that person is and read the information on their face, such as whether they are paying attention to us and whether they are happy or upset. “

(Harry Grout / Unsplash)

This distinction – not only seeing a face, but reading social and emotional information from it – could tell us how much pareidolia objects are processed in our brains and visual systems.

One thing we do know is that not only do people see faces where there aren’t any. A 2017 study found that rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) also seem to perceive illusory faces on inanimate objects, and many other studies have explored the neural mechanisms that may be at the origin of the phenomenon in humans.

In new research, Palmer and fellow UNSW psychologist Colin Clifford set out to determine whether facial pareidolia involves the activation of sensory mechanisms designed to record social information from human faces.

To do this, they recruited 60 participants for experiments in which the pareidolia objects seemed to look more to one side (to the left) than the other. Repeated sightings of faces doing this create a visual illusion called sensory adaptation – in this case the gazes have started to “shift” to the right.

“If you repeatedly see images of faces looking to your left, for example, your perception will actually change over time, so the faces will appear more to the right than they really are,” says Palmer.

“It has been shown to reflect a kind of habituation process in the brain, where cells involved in sensing the direction of gaze change in sensitivity when we are repeatedly exposed to faces with a particular direction of gaze. ”

(Tom Hentoff / Flickr / CC BY 2.0)

“We have found that repeated exposure to pareidolia objects that appear to have a specific direction of attention … causes a systematic bias in the subsequent perception of the direction of gaze more generally, reflected in judgments about eye contact with human faces “, explain the researchers in their new paper in more technical terms.

“Adaptation to the direction of gaze is believed to reflect the plasticity of neural mechanisms that encode the perceptual characteristics of a face; these cross-adaptive effects indicate an overlap in the sensory mechanisms that underlie our experience of facial pareidolia and human social attention.

The results, the team suggest, mean that facial pareidolia goes beyond being a purely cognitive or mnemonic effect, reflecting the processing of information into higher-level sensory mechanisms in the visual system, which are typically used to read emotional states on faces – as if someone is smiling and happy with us, downcast, even furiously angry.

This ability not only to perceive face shapes, but also to read facial emotions is extremely important, given what faces can reveal about those who wear them.

“There is an evolutionary advantage in being really good or really good at detecting faces, it’s important for us socially. It’s also important for detecting predators, ”says Palmer.

Because of this crucial importance, it’s better to perceive more faces than not, in a way, because even when we think we are seeing a face consisting of two windows and a door, it’s not really a problem. But not detecting faces could be.

“If you’ve evolved to be very good at detecting faces, then that could lead to false positives, where you sometimes see faces that aren’t really there,” says Palmer.

“Another way to put it is that it’s better to have a system that is too sensitive to face detection, than a system that is not sensitive enough.”

The results are reported in Psychological science.