Do you see the “face”? Individual differences in face pareidolia

Zhou, Liu-Fang; Meng, Ming

doi:10.1017/prp.2019.27

Cited by 36 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 72 publications

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“…Uchiyama et al (36) found that pareidolia is related to impaired visual and perceptual processes. There have been several studies investigated personality traits and individual differences in relation to pareidolia (37). It was reported that pareidolia is high in religious individuals (38) and individuals high in schizotypy (39).…”

Section: Perception Visual Illusion and Pareidoliamentioning

confidence: 99%

Pareidolia in Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder

Hamza

Kéri

Csigó³

et al. 2021

Front. Psychiatry

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While there are many studies on pareidolia in healthy individuals and patients with schizophrenia, to our knowledge, there are no prior studies on pareidolia in patients with bipolar disorder. Accordingly, in this study, we, for the first time, measured pareidolia in patients with bipolar disorder (N = 50), and compared that to patients with schizophrenia (N = 50) and healthy controls (N = 50). We have used (a) the scene test, which consists of 10 blurred images of natural scenes that was previously found to produce illusory face responses and (b) the noise test which had 32 black and white images consisting of visual noise and 8 images depicting human faces; participants indicated whether a face was present on these images and to point to the location where they saw the face. Illusory responses were defined as answers when observers falsely identified objects that were not on the images in the scene task (maximum illusory score: 10), and the number of noise images in which they reported the presence of a face (maximum illusory score: 32). Further, we also calculated the total pareidolia score for each task (the sum number of images with illusory responses in the scene and noise tests). The responses were scored by two independent raters with an excellent congruence (kappa > 0.9). Our results show that schizophrenia patients scored higher on pareidolia measures than both healthy controls and patients with bipolar disorder. Our findings are agreement with prior findings on more impaired cognitive processes in schizophrenia than in bipolar patients.

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Section: Perception Visual Illusion and Pareidoliamentioning

confidence: 99%

Pareidolia in Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder

Hamza

Kéri

Csigó³

et al. 2021

Front. Psychiatry

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“…The psychobiological function of perceptual distortion is based on survival: if the cause of a phenomenon is known, the cause itself and the respective phenomenon could be prevented; this would allow anticipating environmental threats and finding answers that would guarantee the survival of the species [5,37,38]. In this area, the most studied perceptual distortions are causal illusions and pareidolia [39], which is also very common in believers in pseudoscience [40].…”

Section: Social Health and Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pseudoscientific beliefs and psychopathological risks increase after COVID-19 social quarantine

et al. 2020

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Background: The health crisis caused by COVID-19 has led many countries to opt for social quarantine of the population. During this quarantine, communication systems have been characterized by disintermediation, the acceleration of digitization and an infodemic (excess and saturation of information). The following debate arises: Do the levels related to the psychotic phenotype and pseudoscientific beliefs related to the interpretation of information vary before and after social quarantine? Objectives: This research aims to examine the psychological effects of social quarantine on the psychotic phenotype and pseudoscientific beliefs-experiences of the general nonclinical population. The following hypothesis was posed: social quarantine alters the levels of magical thinking, pseudoscientific beliefs and anomalous perceptions due to quarantine. Methods: A pre-and posttest analysis design was applied based on the difference in means, and complementary Bayesian estimation was performed. A total of 174 Spanish subjects responded to different questionnaires that evaluated psychopathological risks based on psychotic phenotypes, pseudoscientific beliefs and experiences before and after quarantine. Results: Significant differences were obtained for the variables positive psychotic symptoms, depressive symptoms, and certain perceptual alterations (e.g., cenesthetic perceptions), and a significant increase in pseudoscientific beliefs was also observed. The perceptual disturbances that increased the most after quarantine were those related to derealization and depersonalization. However, paranoid perceptions showed the highest increase, doubling the initial standard deviation. These high increases could be related to the delimitation of physical space during social quarantine and distrust towards information communicated by the government to the population. Is it possible that social alarmism generated by the excess of information and pseudoscientific information has increased paranoid perceptual alterations? Conclusions: Measures taken after quarantine indicate that perceptual disturbances, subclinical psychotic symptoms and beliefs in the pseudoscience have increased. We discuss which elements of quarantine coincide with the social marginality theory and its clinical repercussions.

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“…Based on these studies and the facial attentional capture literature, we would have expected that human faces would be most salient, regardless of the small modifications we made. Indeed, keeping in mind recent calls for more generalisation efforts in psychological science (Yarkoni, 2019), we feel that a conceptual replication adds crucial insight to the field of motivated cognition.…”

Section: Human Faces Do Not Inadvertently Capture Attentionmentioning

confidence: 88%

“…While the origin of the pareidolia phenomenon is somewhat contentious (with explanations ranging from "visual false alarms" to reflecting a deeply ingrained need for social contact), it points to the fact that human faces have a unique status in our visual environment (DiSalvo & Gemperle, 2003;Wodehouse et al, 2018;Zhou & Meng, 2019). From birth, babies exhibit a preference for gazing at faces compared to scrambled faces, with a bias for gazing at others' eyes developing within the first year of life (Hessels, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Faces do not attract more attention than non-social distractors in the Stroop task

Henschel¹,

Bargel²,

Cross³

2020

Preprint

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As robots begin to receive citizenship, be treated as beloved pets, and are given a place at Japanese family tables, it is becoming clear that these machines are taking on increasingly social roles. While human robot interaction research relies heavily on self-report measures for assessing people’s perception of robots, a distinct lack of robust cognitive and behavioural measures to gage the scope and limits of social motivation towards artificial agents exists. Here we adapted Conty and colleagues’ (2010) social version of the classic Stroop paradigm, in which we showed four kinds of distractor images above incongruent and neutral words: human faces, robot faces, object faces (for example, a cloud with facial features) and flowers (control). We predicted that social stimuli, like human faces, would be extremely salient and draw attention away from the to-be-processed words. A repeated-measures ANOVA indicated that the task worked (the Stroop effect was observed), and a distractor-dependent enhancement of Stroop interference emerged. Planned contrasts indicated that specifically human faces presented above incongruent words significantly slowed participants’ reaction times. To investigate this small effect further, we conducted a second study (N=51) with a larger stimulus set. While the main effect of the incongruent condition slowing down the reaction time of the participants replicated, we did not observe an interaction effect of the social distractors (human faces) drawing more attention than the other distractor types. We question the suitability of this task as a robust measure for social motivation and discuss our findings in the light of the conflicting results of Hietanen and colleagues (2016).

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Do you see the “face”? Individual differences in face pareidolia

Cited by 36 publications

References 72 publications

Pareidolia in Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder

Pareidolia in Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder

Pseudoscientific beliefs and psychopathological risks increase after COVID-19 social quarantine

Faces do not attract more attention than non-social distractors in the Stroop task

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