School of Psychology, University of New South Wales.
Psychol Sci. 2020 Aug;31(8):1001-1012. doi: 10.1177/0956797620924814. Epub 2020 Jul 22.
Face pareidolia is the phenomenon of seeing facelike structures in everyday objects. Here, we tested the hypothesis that face pareidolia, rather than being limited to a cognitive or mnemonic association, reflects the activation of visual mechanisms that typically process human faces. We focused on sensory cues to social attention, which engage cell populations in temporal cortex that are susceptible to habituation effects. Repeated exposure to "pareidolia faces" that appear to have a specific direction of attention causes a systematic bias in the perception of where human faces are looking, indicating that overlapping sensory mechanisms are recruited when we view human faces and when we experience face pareidolia. These cross-adaptation effects are significantly reduced when pareidolia is abolished by removing facelike features from the objects. These results indicate that face pareidolia is essentially a perceptual phenomenon, occurring when sensory input is processed by visual mechanisms that have evolved to extract specific social content from human faces.
面孔错觉是指在日常物体中看到类似面孔的结构的现象。在这里，我们测试了这样一种假设，即面孔错觉不仅仅局限于认知或记忆联想，而是反映了视觉机制的激活，这些机制通常处理人类面孔。我们专注于社会注意力的感觉线索，这些线索吸引颞叶皮层中的细胞群体，使其容易受到习惯化效应的影响。反复暴露于“错觉面孔”中，这些面孔似乎有特定的注视方向，会导致对人类面孔注视方向的感知产生系统性偏差，表明当我们观察人类面孔和体验面孔错觉时，会招募重叠的感觉机制。当从物体中去除类似面孔的特征来消除错觉时，这种交叉适应效应会显著降低。这些结果表明，面孔错觉本质上是一种知觉现象，当输入的感觉信息被进化而来的视觉机制处理时，就会发生这种现象，这些机制的作用是从人类面孔中提取特定的社会内容。
