Pareidolia

What is pareidolia?

Pareidolia is perceiving a recognizable form in an ambiguous pattern, such as a face in a cloud or wood grain. The resemblance is experienced even though the pattern is not the object it appears to depict.

Think of an electrical outlet that seems to have two eyes and a surprised mouth. You know it is an outlet. You can still see the face. That difference is useful: perceiving a resemblance does not require believing that a person is really there.

Why faces turn up in unlikely places

A few features in the right arrangement can suggest a familiar object. Perception also reflects what you are looking for, particularly when the input is ambiguous. In Liu and colleagues’ study, people searched noisy images for faces or letters after training that encouraged them to expect those forms. During the test, the images contained only noise, yet participants sometimes reported seeing the expected form.

The researchers used the same noise images in the face and letter tasks. This comparison helped them examine how what people were looking for related to what they reported seeing. Brain imaging also found a face-selective response in the right fusiform face area when participants reported faces rather than letters. That association does not locate pareidolia in a single brain region or establish one cause for every everyday example.

Pareidolia and apophenia

Apophenia is the broader idea of finding meaningful patterns or connections that the evidence does not support. Pareidolia concerns a recognizable form in sensory input. Seeing a face in toast is pareidolia. Deciding that several unrelated coincidences contain a message for you goes beyond a visual resemblance.

Research on apophenia includes ordinary pattern perception as well as questions about mental health. Seeing a face in a cloud, by itself, does not establish a disorder. Nor does it have to be treated as a harmful cognitive bias: you may simply enjoy the resemblance while knowing exactly what you are looking at.

What does the pattern actually show?

If a shape seems meaningful, separate the resemblance from the claim you might make about it. “This rock looks like a face” describes your perception. “Someone carved this rock” is a further claim that needs evidence about the rock’s origin. The first can be true without the second being true.

References

• Liu, J., Li, J., Feng, L., Li, L., Tian, J., & Lee, K. (2014). Seeing Jesus in toast: Neural and behavioral correlates of face pareidolia. Cortex, 53, 60–77.
• Blain, S. D., Longenecker, J. M., Grazioplene, R. G., Klimes-Dougan, B., & DeYoung, C. G. (2020). Apophenia as the disposition to false positives: A unifying framework for openness and psychoticism. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 129(3), 279–292.