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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Visual Perception

Background:

  • The human visual system often perceives illusory faces (IFs) as real, a phenomenon known as face pareidolia.
  • Previous research indicates IF processing involves face-like neural activity and is influenced by context.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how the presence of human faces as a visual context affects the categorization of IFs.
  • To determine if human faces facilitate or interfere with IF categorization.

Main Methods:

  • Experiment 1 used electroencephalography (EEG) with a frequency-tagging approach to measure neural responses to IFs presented with either human faces (face context, FC) or houses (nonface context, NC).
  • Experiment 2 involved an explicit IF detection task to assess behavioral performance (reaction times and accuracy) under FC and NC conditions.

Main Results:

  • Neural responses selective for IFs were significantly weaker and less face-like in the face context (FC) compared to the nonface context (NC).
  • Participants showed slower reaction times and lower detection accuracy for IFs in the face context (FC) than in the nonface context (NC).

Conclusions:

  • The presence of human faces interferes with, rather than facilitates, the categorization of illusory faces.
  • This interference likely occurs because human faces and IFs compete for shared face-selective neural resources.
  • Context plays a critical role in dynamically shaping both neural and perceptual processing of ambiguous visual stimuli.