Children perceive illusory faces in objects as male more often than female

Abstract

Face pareidolia is the experience of seeing illusory faces in inanimate objects. Such illusory faces are frequently perceived to have characteristics along social dimensions such as age, gender and emotional expression, suggesting engagement of our face evaluation system. Recently it was shown that adults have a bias to see illusory faces as male more often than female. While children also experience face pareidolia, it is unknown whether they also perceive gender in illusory faces and if so, whether they also show a male bias. Here we investigated the perception of illusory faces and gender in a sample of 412 children and adults from 4 years to 80 years of age. The face pareidolia stimuli were 160 color photographs of illusory faces spontaneously observed in a variety of objects such as food, vehicles, and household items. Participants of all ages saw illusory faces in most stimuli. Like adults, children aged 4-8 years and 8-14 years also perceived many illusory faces in objects to have a gender and had a strong bias to see them as male rather than female, regardless of their own gender identification. These results provide evidence that the male bias for face pareidolia emerges relatively early in the lifespan, even before the ability to discriminate gender from facial cues alone is fully developed. Further, the existence of a male bias in children suggests that any social context that elicits the cognitive bias to see faces as male has remained relatively consistent across recent generations.