Do you see faces in the clouds? Researchers examine pareidolia
Humans are masters of seeing faces in any old thing—a handbag, TV static, toasted white bread. Scientists want to know why. A few years ago, as the category 5 Hurricane Milton bore down on the Florida coast, the internet ...
Seeing faces in everyday objects is so common scientists have a word for it—"face pareidolia"—but why we do it is a mystery.
"People see all sorts of things," says researcher from the UNSW School of Psychology, Dr. Lindsay Peterson, and author of a recent study examining the phenomenon published in Royal Society Open Science.
Inside the face pareidolia experiments
Dr. Peterson's study drew on two experiments involving around 70 participants, who were asked to identify faces and assign traits such as age, gender and emotion across both object images and abstract "visual noise."
In one experiment, respondents were shown a picture of a handbag in whose zip, folds, and buckles they consistently saw a young and happy smiling face, and a picture of "visual noise."
In the noise, interpretations quickly diverged.
"Buddha, angels, demons, dragons. It's amazing you can have these quite rich responses to a stimulus that is essentially noise," she says.
"It is quite remarkable what we see given that in the noise stimulus, it is just noise. There really isn't anything there."
In experiment two, the researchers introduced vertical symmetry—a subtle structural cue that loosely mirrors the layout of a human face.
At one point, Hurricane Milton looked a little like a skull. Credit: Weather Underground