Specific neural mechanisms cause humans to experience pareidolia
Multiple neuroimaging and electrophysiological studies demonstrate that specific neural mechanisms—involving face-selective cortical regions, subcortical pathways, and frontoparietal networks—underlie the human experience of face pareidolia.
The retrieved literature consistently points to specific neural correlates, including activations in the fusiform face area, prefrontal cortex, and subcortical pathways, that govern the perception of face pareidolia. The evidence robustly supports the claim that specific neural mechanisms cause or correlate with this phenomenon.
Diane Rekow, Jean-Yves Baudouin, Renaud Brochard, Bruno Rossion, Arnaud Leleu. Rapid neural categorization of facelike objects predicts the perceptual awareness of a face ( <i>face pareidolia</i> ). 2021. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.19.431826
Rapid categorization tasks using EEG show that face-selective brain activity predicts the conscious perception of face pareidolia.
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Gülsüm Akdeniz, Sadiye Gumusyayla, Gonul Vural, Orhan Deniz, Pınar Özışık. Face and face pareidolia in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy indicates different neural processing: an event-related potential study. 2024. https://doi.org/10.1186/s42494-024-00175-2
Event-related potential studies indicate specific neural processing correlates, such as N100 and P100 components, during face pareidolia.
Jessica Taubert, Susan G Wardle, Clarissa T Tardiff, Elissa A Koele, Susheel Kumar, Adam Messinger, Leslie G Ungerleider. The cortical and subcortical correlates of face pareidolia in the macaque brain.. 2022. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsac031
Functional imaging in nonhuman primates reveals that cortical and subcortical face-selective regions respond differentially to objects with illusory facial features.
Keren Leadner, Silvart Arabian, Shai Gabay. The involvement of monocular channels in the face pareidolia effect.. 2022. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-021-02027-3
Stereoscope experiments demonstrate subcortical and monocular channel involvement in processing face-like pareidolia stimuli.
Gulsum Akdeniz, Sila Toker, Ibrahim Atli. Neural mechanisms underlying visual pareidolia processing: An fMRI study.. 2018. https://doi.org/10.12669/pjms.346.16140
fMRI findings indicate that face pareidolia requires specific interactions between top-down and bottom-up brain regions, including the fusiform face area and prefrontal cortex.
Nathan Caruana, Kiley Seymour. Objects that induce face pareidolia are prioritized by the visual system.. 2022. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12546
Behavioral and neuroimaging evidence shows that objects inducing face pareidolia are prioritized by specialized neural mechanisms for rapid face detection.
David Alais, Yiben Xu, Susan G Wardle, Jessica Taubert. A shared mechanism for facial expression in human faces and face pareidolia.. 2021. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.0966
Serial dependence paradigms demonstrate that illusory faces share common expression processing mechanisms with human faces.
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