Better to misidentify than to miss: A review of occurrence mechanisms and applications of face pareidolia

doi:10.3724/sp.j.1042.2023.00240

Paper

Better to misidentify than to miss: A review of occurrence mechanisms and applications of face pareidolia

Published 2023 · Zi-Wei Chen, FU Di, Liu Xun

Advances in Psychological Science

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Abstract

： In real life, people occasionally perceive an object as something non-existent, called pareidolia. The elements of face pareidolia have been widely utilized in art, advertising, and design to attract attention and promote consumption. At the same time, previous studies using various paradigms have found differences in producing face pareidolia between patients and typical individuals and the link between pareidolia and visual hallucinations. According to two visual processing pathways, the related paradigms can be divided into pareidolia monitoring paradigm and pareidolia discrimination paradigm. The former focuses on rapid prediction based on extracted face-like features, while the latter focuses on predictive code guiding individuals to extract object features. Both will eventually affect subsequent cognitive judgments. Future studies are suggested to develop new paradigms to explore further the interaction between top-down and bottom-up mechanisms of face pareidolia.

Literature Review

Study Snapshot

Key takeawayFace pareidolia, a common phenomenon in art, advertising, and design, can be divided into two main paradigms: pareidolia monitoring and pareidolia discrimination, both affecting cognitive judgments.

PopulationOlder adults (50-71 years)

Sample size24

MethodsObservational

OutcomesBody Mass Index projections

ResultsSocial networks mitigate obesity in older groups.

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Better to misidentify than to miss: A review of occurrence mechanisms and applications of face pareidolia

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References

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Pareidolia in built environments is more sensitive and noticeable in the early morning and at midnight, with age, gender, and certain lifestyle factors playing a role.

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Face pareidolia occurs when visual mechanisms activated to detect human social attention process facelike structures in everyday objects.

Citations

Face processing emerges from object-trained convolutional neural networks

Face processing emerges from object-trained convolutional neural networks, supporting domain-general object recognition mechanisms.