A divergent approach to pareidolias—Exploring creativity in a novel way.

Abstract

Pareidolias, the illusory perception of patterns like faces or animals in backgrounds or textures (e.g., clouds), may be a potentially interesting paradigm to assess creativity. The present study investigates the relationship between production of pareidolias, divergent thinking, and associative thinking. To analyze creative aspects of pareidolias a tablet-based task was devised, the Divergent Pareidolias Task (DPT), where participants were presented with photographs of natural landscapes and they were asked to produce pareidolias. Pareidolic outputs were analyzed in terms of fluency, flexibility, and originality. Creativity-related cognitive tasks (i.e., tasks assessing alertness, cognitive inhibition, and verbal intelligence) and a short interview assessing creative interests in everyday life were additionally administered. Regression analyses revealed that divergent thinking, in terms of fluency of the Alternative Uses Task significantly predicted fluency and originality of pareidolias produced in the DPT. Moreover, fluent and rarer associations in an Associative Fluency Task were predictive of fluent and original aspects of pareidolias in the DPT, respectively. Taken together, the results of this pilot study indicate the involvement of creative processes in the production of pareidolias and suggest that the DPT could represent a possible future way to investigate divergent aspects of creative cognition.

Creative, yet not unique? Paranormal belief, but not self-rated creative ideation behavior is associated with a higher propensity to perceive unique meanings in randomness

“…Since Runco's Ideational Behavior Scale is a valid indicator of the creative potential of a person ( Runco et al., 2014 ), our results corroborate a positive relationship between creative ideation performance and the propensity to perceive meaning in random arrangements ( Rominger et al., 2017 ) and to see patterns in new ways ( Wiseman et al., 2011 ). Furthermore, our finding is in accordance with Diana et al. (2020) , who showed an association between participants' creative ideation performance and their skill in producing as many divergent illusory perception patterns as possible when looking at photographs of clouds and stones.…”

“…Although many authors have suggested a relationship between apophenia and creativity ( Brugger, 2001 ; DeYoung et al., 2012 ; Rominger et al., 2011 ), the empirical evidence is still limited, since to date, only a few studies are available on this topic. Diana et al. (2020) showed that divergent thinking performance (i.e., the production of as many original ideas as possible) is associated with the propensity to detect various meanings in pictures of natural landscapes, which indicates that creativity and apophenia might share some cognitive functions.…”

Processing visual ambiguity in fractal patterns: Pareidolia as a sign of creativity

“…Although we do not have the data to address this, we would cautiously speculate that similar results would be obtained if creativity is assessed using a divergent thinking task. This is for instance supported by previous work on pareidolia that measured creativity using the standard Alternative Uses Task (40).…”

“…Their results show that participants who passively looked at ambiguous figures, compared to non-ambiguous figures, scored higher on fluency, flexibility and originality in a subsequent Alternative Uses Task, and on creativity in a story generation task, thereby suggesting that processing ambiguous stimuli could have a beneficial priming effect on creative processes. Another recent study demonstrated that performances on both free association and divergent thinking tasks were predictive of pareidolic fluency and originality (40), also pointing to a functional role of pareidolia in creativity. With the present study, we incorporated a parametric manipulation of image complexity and showed that pareidolia in low-creativity individuals exhibited a stronger dependency on stimulus properties, while divergent perception skills of high-creatives were less dependent on the physical properties of the stimulus.…”

“…Pareidolia has mostly been studied in the context of face detection (37)(38)(39), although more recent studies relied on natural scenery images (40) or generative stimuli (41)(42)(43), while the empirical relation between creativity and pareidolia has received little attention. One exception is (40) who demonstrated that fluency on a DT task significantly predicts fluency and originality in a Divergent Pareidolia Task. Pareidolia can be seen as the perceptual counterpart of DT, in that it relies on finding multiple solutions within a single problem space.…”