Pareidolic faces receive prioritized attention in the dot-probe task.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive psychology
• Neuroscience
• Visual perception

Background:

• Face pareidolia is the perception of faces in inanimate objects.
• Real faces gain automatic attentional priority over non-face objects.
• It remains unclear if illusory faces also receive prioritized attention.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if face pareidolia elicits prioritized attention.
• To determine the 'faceness' level of pareidolic faces.
• To test the hypothesis that illusory faces activate a broad face detection system.

Main Methods:

• Dot-probe experiments were used to compare attention to pareidolic faces versus objects, animal faces, and human faces.
• Image inversion was employed to assess the role of low-level features.
• Attentional prioritization was measured by response times and accuracy.

Main Results:

• Pareidolic faces attracted more attention than objects, and this effect was reduced by inversion.
• Illusory faces received more attention than animal faces and similar attention to human faces.
• Pareidolic faces may be perceived as human-like with larger facial features.

Conclusions:

• Face pareidolia automatically captures attention, similar to real human faces.
• Findings support a sensitive, broad face detection system prone to false positives (illusory faces).
• Evolutionarily, this system prioritizes detecting potential threats over missing signals.