Contrast negation increases face pareidolia rates in natural scenes

Face pareidolia, the phenomenon of seeing face-like patterns in non-face images, has a dual nature: Pareidolic patterns are experienced as face-like, even while observers can recognize the true nature of the stimulus (Stuart et al., 2025). Although pareidolic faces seem to result largely from the canonical arrangement of eye spots and a mouth, we hypothesized that competition between veridical and face-like interpretations of pareidolic patterns may constrain face pareidolia in natural scenes and textures. Specifically, we predicted that contrast negation, which disrupts multiple aspects of mid- to high-level recognition, may increase rates of face pareidolia in complex natural textures by weakening the veridical, non-face stimulus interpretation. We presented adult participants (n = 27) and 5- to 12-year-old children (n = 67) with a series of natural images depicting textures such as grass, leaves, shells, and rocks. We asked participants to circle any patterns in each image that looked face-like, with no constraints on response time or pattern size, position, and orientation. We found that, across our adult and child samples, contrast-negated images yielded more pareidolic face detections than positive images. We conclude that disrupting veridical object and texture recognition enhances pareidolia in children and adults by compromising half of the dual nature of a pareidolic pattern.