“Do you see a face?” Someone might have asked you this question in your lifetime at least once or you would have asked it to somebody else. This question introduces the phenomenon known as face pareidolia, when people spot face-like patterns in everyday objects. Studies suggest that the human brain is highly sensitive to faces, rapidly detecting them before even identifying what the object actually is.
Face pareidolia refers to the experience of perceiving a face in an inanimate object or pattern that does not actually contain a human face. Examples include seeing a smile in a rock formation, eyes in a cloud pattern, or a face in the front of a car. 1 This phenomenon arises because our visual system is highly tuned for face-detection.
A recent neuroscience review explains that objects resembling faces may engage the early stages of face-processing mechanisms in the brain.
On his LinkedIn post, Dr. Sheroze Ullah Khan, MBBS, MD Psychiatry, shared his insights on face pareidolia.
One of the reasons why pareidolia happens is that our brain is especially good at recognizing faces. Faces are very important for social communication and survival, so we have a specialized brain area called the fusiform face area, located in the inferior temporal cortex (IT), in the fusiform gyrus (Brodmann area 37), that is dedicated to processing facial features.
Dr. Sheroze Ullah Khan, MBBS, MD Psychiatry
Our ability to recognise faces quickly, often within a few hundred milliseconds is critical for social interaction. Because faces are so important, humans evolved neural circuits specialised for face detection. These circuits, however, are broadly tuned and can respond to objects that look like faces. 4
Studies show that when people view face-like objects (pareidolia stimuli), they can activate similar brain regions and temporal dynamics as real faces, for example, the fusiform face area (FFA) and early ERP components such as N170.3
Researchers propose that a fast “sub-cortical” visual pathway may facilitate the rapid detection of face-like patterns before conscious recognition.
From an evolutionary perspective, erring on the side of seeing faces may have been adaptive: recognising potential social agents, predators or allies quickly could confer survival benefits. Thus, the brain’s face-detection systems may favour sensitivity (even if that means false positives). 1
Some studies have found that female observers are more likely than males to experience face pareidolia. For example, an ERP study reported that women showed more engagement in affective and social processing when viewing pareidolic stimuli than men. 2
Another study found that people (regardless of their own gender) tend to perceive illusory faces as male rather than female, showing a male-face bias in pareidolia. 3
Research indicates that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may be less likely to perceive face-like objects as faces and may respond more slowly. One study of children found that those with ASD identified fewer pareidolic faces than typically developing peers. 3
Further, eye-tracking and EEG studies suggest that people with ASD allocate attention differently, fixating less on the parts of the image where a face might be and more on non-face areas. 3
Some evidence indicates that sensitivity to face-detection and pareidolia may correlate with age. One study found that pareidolia correlates with age rather than with autism-traits per se. 5
In everyday life, you may experience face pareidolia when:
A pattern of two windows and a door looks like a smiling face.
A cloud formation resembles a face or figure.
The arrangement of items on a plate or crumbs on toast seem to form a face.
These experiences reflect the brain’s tendency to interpret ambiguous patterns as meaningful, especially when they resemble faces.
Because face-processing is so foundational to social interaction, disruptions in how people perceive faces (including pareidolia) can signal or accompany neurological or developmental conditions (e.g., ASD).
Understanding individual differences in face perception may help in designing diagnostic tools or therapies for conditions where face-processing is atypical.
In neuroscience research, pareidolia serves as a useful paradigm to probe face-detection circuits without using real faces, thereby isolating perceptual and attentional mechanisms. 3
Face pareidolia illustrates how our brains are perpetually scanning the environment for meaningful social signals, in this case, faces, even in ordinary objects.
Wardle, Susan G., Jessica Taubert, Lina Teichmann, Chris I. Baker et al. 2020. “Rapid and Dynamic Processing of Face Pareidolia in the Human Brain.” Nature Communications 11 (1): Article 4518. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18325-8.
Proverbio, Alice M., and Jessica Galli. 2016. “Women Are Better at Seeing Faces Where There Are None: An ERP Study of Face Pareidolia.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 11 (9): 1501-1512. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5015812/
Caruana, Nathan, Kiley Seymour et al. 2022. “Objects That Induce Face Pareidolia Are Prioritised by the Visual System.” British Journal of Psychology 113 (2): 496-507. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34923634/
Pavlova, Marina A., Valentina Romagnano, Andreas J. Fallgatter, and Alexander N. Sokolov. 2020. “Face Pareidolia in the Brain: Impact of Gender and Orientation.” PLOS ONE 15 (12): e0244516. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244516.
Zhou, Liu-Fang, and Ming Meng. 2020. “Do You See the ‘Face’? Individual Differences in Face Pareidolia.” Journal of Pacific Rim Psychology 14: e2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338562603_Do_you_see_the_face_Individual_differences_in_face_pareidolia.
Edited by M Subha Maheswari
