standard test on pattern recognition garners extraordinary results
©2016 Professor Zeibowitz
Can you see faces in these objects?
It's fun sometimes when your eyes play tricks on you, and you see a face that isn't really there, staring back at you from a power plug. This phenomenon is called Face Pareidolia, and it's something that humans naturally do.
But it looks like facial features aren't the only thing that we see when we come across an illusory face. A new study has found that we also see age, emotion, and gender – and strangely enough the vast majority of these funny faces are perceived as male faces.
"The aim of our study was to understand whether examples of face pareidolia carry the kinds of social signals that faces normally transmit, such as expression and biological sex," says one of the researchers, Oxford University psychology researcher Jessica Taubert.
"Our results showed a striking bias in gender perception, with many more illusory faces perceived as male than female."
The researchers recruited 3,815 participants for an online experiment, asking them to look at over 200 photos of illusory faces.
The participants were asked to give the images a rating out of 10 for how easily they could see a face, as well as indicating what emotion they saw in the face, the age range of the face, and the gender of the face as 'male', 'female', or 'neutral'.
The applicants saw mostly young faces in the photos – seeing them as either a child or a young adult.
Emotions on the other hand were quite varied, with 34 percent of the images perceived as happy, 19 percent surprised, 19 percent neutral, and 14 percent angry. A smaller number of faces were perceived as showing sadness, fear, or disgust.
Both social scientists and psychologists agree that in all likelihood Face Pareidolia is caused by Pattern Recognition - a natural cognitive process that matches information from a stimulus with information retrieved from memory.
The research department at Oxford University hypothesize that Face Pareidolia emanates from the powerful memories we create in childhood.
We invited 3,458 parents and their children to take part in a study that took place over the course of 3 weeks (June 2016)
A resultant 4,705 children were asked to draw any picture that they wanted to from a variety of supplied media which included biro pens, crayons and felt tips.
We expected to collect a range of different drawings like cars, and people and houses but...
To our utter astonishment, every single child drew a Flower...
Our researchers were perturbed. What could have caused this scale of continuity?
No flowers were present in the testing laboratory, and no beds of flowers are visible on the grounds of the research department.
In the main most parents reported that their children had no overriding tendency to draw flowers before the study began.
What began as a simple experiment on Pattern Recognition took a powerful turn, and garnered unexpected results which require examination.
Therefore a repeat of this study is planned for late summer 2017 to compare these extraordinary results.
Here are a range of the drawings we collected.
