What is pareidolia and why we see faces everywhere

What is pareidolia

It is a visual illusion that makesG. Akdeniz, S. Toker, and I. Atli. Neural mechanisms underlying visual pareidolia processing: An fMRI study / Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences people to see faces, images of animals, outlines of familiar objects where they are not. If you look at the starry sky and see an inverted bucket there or notice that the cloud looks like a white-maned horse, this is it, pareidolia.

One of the most common special cases of this visual distortion is facial pareidolia. She studiedC. J. Palmer, C. W. G. Clifford. Face Pareidolia Recruits Mechanisms for Detecting Human Social Attention / Psychologocal Science more than others and, perhaps, the most popular: faces are found in the outlines of objects and natural phenomena more often than anything else.

Let's figure out why this is happening.

Why do we see faces where they are not?

Pareidolia is based on several mechanisms at once. They do not exist on their own, but rather complement each other.

Evolutionary necessity

This version was expressed byPareidolia: A Bizarre Bug of the Human Mind Emerges in Computers / The Atlantic American popularizer of science, astrophysicist and exobiologist Carl Sagan. In his opinion, the ability to recognize faces at a distance or in poor visibility conditions was one of the key survival factors for our ancestors.

A man who knew how to determine whether someone from a hostile tribe was hiding in the dense jungle could flee in time. And those whose brains were not "sharpened" to search for unfriendly human faces quickly perished.

There is another evolutionary moment.

In general, not all survived. We are just the descendants of those who instantly reacted to the faces of enemies and mom and dad. Our evolutionarily trained brain is ready to look for the combination of "eyes, nose, mouth" everywhere.

Human expectations

Habit also plays a role. If from childhood we are accustomed to seeing many faces around, including looking for them in inanimate objects (remember the cartoons about Moidodyr or Kapitoshka with other humanized objects), we can begin to calculate familiar features in real life, for example, in the wild or the outlines of buildings.

There is scientific evidence to support the power of expectations. In a small experiment, Canadian researchers used magnetic resonance imaging to find outJ. Liu, J. Li, L. Feng, L. Li, J. Tian, ​​K. Lee. Seeing Jesus in toast: Neural and behavioral correlates of face pareidoliawhat happens in the brain when a person detects a "face" in random objects.

It turned out that pareidolia is based on the almost simultaneous activation of two areas of the brain - the site the frontal cortex, which is responsible for expectations, and the visual cortex, which specializes in recognition persons. Moreover, the former largely controls the latter. That is, consciousness affects vision: people expect to encounter something familiar and end up seeing this.

A common brain algorithm for many living beings

Pareidolia is familiar not only to humans. Scientists have discoveredM. A. Pavlova, V. Romagnano, A. J. Fallgatter, A. N. Sokolov. Face pareidolia in the brain: Impact of gender and orientation / PLOS ONEthat different living beings have the ability to see faces in images without them. For example, in primates, in particular rhesus monkeys, domestic chickens and even newly hatched turtles.

From this, the researchers concluded: there is a certain recognition mechanism common to living beings. Presumably it works like this. To begin with, the brain analyzes what it sees and tries to establish spatial connections between the components of the picture. In parallel, he compares what he found with already familiar images. If a suitable picture is stored in the memory, and even more so when it is significant (that is, the brain has often encountered it), the recognition process is instantly launched: “I have already seen it! That's what it is! "

Two schematic "eyes" and "mouth" under them are sufficient reason for our brain to clearly see the face.

It doesn't matter that the "eyes" are, for example, two windows on the second floor of a house, and the "mouth" is the front door. Or maybe two bubbles on the surface of the coffee and an oddly formed foam.

What Pareidolia Propensity Tells About You

Some people see pareidolia more often than others. Scientists suggest that on this basis one can partly judge the inclinations of a particular person and even his mental health.

Thus, researchers from the University of Helsinki during a short experiment discoveredT. Riekki, M. Lindeman, M. Aleneff, A. Halme, A. Nuortimo. Paranormal and Religious Believers Are More Prone to Illusory Face Perception than Skeptics and Non-believers / Applied Cognitive Psychology: Religious people and those who strongly believe in the supernatural are more likely to notice "faces" in their surroundings and landscapes.

And if it comes to the fact that it becomes difficult for a person to distinguish an illusion from reality - for example, it seems to him that faces are everywhere and spying on him, we can talk about an impending disease Alzheimer'sCalum A Hamilton, Fiona E Matthews, Louise M Allan, Sally Barker, Joanna Ciafone, Paul C Donaghy, Rory Durcan, Michael J. Firbank, Sarah Lawley, John T O'Brien, Gemma Roberts, John-Paul Taylor, Alan J. Thomas. Utility of the pareidolia test in mild cognitive impairment with Lewy bodies and Alzheimer’s disease / International journal of geriatric psychiatry or schizophreniaRebecca Rolf, Alexander N. Sokolov, Tim W. Rattay, Andreas J. Fallgatter, Marina A. Pavlova. Face pareidolia in schizophrenia / Schizophrenia Research.

But so far these are all just theories: it is too early to use pareidolia as a diagnostic tool. Scientists only continue to use her example to study how the human brain works.