Study -- So Happy to See You: Our Brains Respond Emotionally to Faces We Find in Inanimate Objects
upstart writes:
According to new research by the University of Sydney, our brains detect and respond emotionally to these illusory faces the same way they do to real human faces.
Face pareidolia[*] - seeing faces in random objects or patterns of light and shadow - is an everyday phenomenon. Once considered a symptom of psychosis, it arises from an error in visual perception.
Lead researcher Prof David Alais, of the University of Sydney, said human brains are evolutionarily hardwired to recognise faces, with highly specialised brain regions for facial detection and processing.
[...] Faces are detected incredibly fast. The brain seems to do this... using a kind of template-matching procedure, so if it sees an object that appears to have two eyes above a nose above a mouth, then it goes, Oh I'm seeing a face.'
It's a bit fast and loose and sometimes it makes mistakes, so something that resembles a face will often trigger this template match."
The researchers showed people a sequence of faces - a jumble of both real faces and pareidolia images - and had participants rate each facial expression on a scale between angry and happy.
The researchers found that inanimate objects had a similar emotional priming effect to real faces.
What we found was that actually these pareidolia images are processed by the same mechanism that would normally process emotion in a real face," Alais said.
[*] Pareidolia on Wikipedia.
Journal Reference:
David Alais, Yiben Xu, Susan G. Wardle, et al. A shared mechanism for facial expression in human faces and face pareidolia, Proceedings of the Royal Society B (DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2021.0966)
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