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3w ago

Faces in Objects Skew Male, Peer-Reviewed Study Finds

The results point to fast face-detection shortcuts that lean toward threat cues in ambiguous images.

Australian scientists found that humans are more likely to see male faces in inanimate objects.
Image
This satellite imagery in October 2024 showed Hurricane Milton resembling a creepy skull as it approached Florida. Seeing things, such as faces, in random objects is a phenomenon known as pareidolia. Image via Max Velocity.

Overview

  • Pareidolia, the tendency to see faces in random patterns, showed a bias toward male labels in a University of New South Wales study published in Royal Society Open Science.
  • In tests with 70 participants, 96.7% reported a face in a handbag photo compared with 53.4% in abstract visual noise, and 90% saw at least one face in the noise set.
  • Introducing vertical symmetry to moving noise made faces more likely to pop out, with reports rising to 65.8% versus 23.6% for random motion.
  • Participants more often judged vague or feature-poor illusory faces as angry, which fits with a rapid threat-checking tendency.
  • The authors say studying illusory faces can reveal how the brain detects and sorts real faces, and they plan follow-up work to test when and how these biases shift.