![]() ![]() This story originally appeared on Ars Technica. For the brain, fake or real, faces are all processed the same way." And that scowl or smile-that's your brain's facial expression system at work. "This 'cross-over' condition is important, as it shows that the same underlying facial expression process is involved, regardless of image type," said Alais. "This means that seeing faces in clouds is more than a child's fantasy. When objects look compellingly facelike, it is more than an interpretation: They really are driving your brain's face-detection network. ![]() concluded that this is indicative of a shared underlying mechanism between the two, which means "expression processing is not tightly bound to human facial features," they wrote. And when real faces and pareidolia images are mixed, as in the second experiment, that serial dependence was more pronounced when subjects viewed the pareidolia images before the human faces. That is, a happy or angry illusory face in an object will be perceived as more similar in expression to the preceding one. The subjects also showed the same serial dependency bias as Tinder users or art gallery patrons. Specifically, the results showed that subjects could reliably rate the pareidolia images for facial expression. It remains simultaneously an object and a face.” “What we found was that actually these pareidolia images are processed by the same mechanism that would normally process emotion in a real face,” Alais told The Guardian. “You are somehow unable to totally turn off that face response and emotion response and see it as an object. Each participant rated a given image eight times, and those results were averaged into a mean estimate of the image's expression. The second experiment was similar, except both real faces and pareidolia images were randomly combined in the trials. The other half of the subjects did the opposite. Half of the subjects completed the portion using real faces first and the pareidolia images second. Subjects completed a sequence of 320 trials, with each of the images shown eight times in randomized order. The first experiment was designed to test for serial effects. We judge paintings as being more appealing if we view them after seeing another attractive painting, and we rate them less attractive if the prior painting was also less aesthetically appealing. Instead, we're prone to a “contrast effect," and our appreciation of art shows the same serial-dependence bias. Alais and his coauthors found that we don't assess each painting we view in a museum or gallery on its own merits. This was followed by a 2019 paper in the Journal of Vision, which extended that experimental approach to our appreciation of art. The team found that many stimulus attributes-including orientation, facial expression and attractiveness, and perceived slimness-are systematically biased toward recent experience. designed a binary task that mimicked the selection interface in online dating websites and apps (like Tinder), in which users swipe left or right if they deem the profile pictures of potential partners attractive or unattractive. For instance, in a 2016 paper published in Scientific Reports, he and some colleagues built on prior research involving rapid sequences of faces that demonstrated that perception of face identity, as well as attractiveness, is biased toward recently seen faces. So if it sees an object that appears to have two eyes above a nose above a mouth, then it goes, 'Oh I'm seeing a face.' It’s a bit fast and loose, and sometimes it makes mistakes, so something that resembles a face will often trigger this template match.”Īlais has been interested in this and related topics for years. The brain seems to do this using a kind of template-matching procedure. ![]() Lead author David Alais, of the University of Sydney, told The Guardian: “We are such a sophisticated social species, and face recognition is very important … You need to recognize who it is, is it family, is it a friend or foe, what are their intentions and emotions? Faces are detected incredibly fast. The Sydney team described its work in a recent paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. This shared mechanism perhaps evolved as a result of the need to quickly judge whether a person is a friend or foe. ![]() Scientists at the University of Sydney have found that not only do we see faces in everyday objects, our brains even process objects for emotional expression much like we do for real faces, rather than discarding the objects as false detections. The phenomenon's fancy name is facial pareidolia. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. ![]()
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