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If you have ever started seeing faces in clouds or were thinking that your teapot might be smiling at you, don't worry, you're not crazy. Pareidolia is common for a lot of us. Still, it's interesting why our brains are seemingly wired to see faces everywhere: is it because we like to give anthropomorphic qualities to everything?
Researcher Mark Hamilton and his team completed their research on pareidolia in 2024 and have some theories about why we tend to see eyes, noses, and mouths everywhere. The researchers think that pareidolia is just our way of protecting ourselves.
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In a way, pareidolia is the result of our survival instinct. "Our research points to the fact that it might be because of the need to quickly parse and identify animal faces," Hamilton told Bored Panda. "Possibly for things like avoiding predators and catching prey."
Interestingly, humans aren't alone in seeing faces in places where there are none. "Other research that we reference in our paper shows even rhesus monkeys experience pareidolia," Hamilton added. "Pareidolia happens very quickly in the brain, a sign that it's a deep-rooted evolutionary artifact."
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In their research, Hamilton and his team first fed a state-of-the-art face detector images of human faces. They asked it to recognize faces in pareidolic images. The algorithm didn't do so well, with only a 9% average precision. When the algorithm was trained on pareidolic images, on the other hand, it was way more precise and had a 36% AP.
"Our research specifically showed that algorithms trained on human faces alone didn't see nearly as much pareidolia as algorithms trained on human and animal faces," Hamilton says. Training the algorithm on animal faces made it recognize pareidolic images even better. Hamilton believes it's because the algorithm generalized beyond just human facial features.
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When the algorithm is trained on animal faces it starts thinking about faces more abstractly. "If you think about it, animal faces have a ton of different variants and colors, which might explain why we can see pareidolic faces that look nothing like human faces," Hamilton explains.
If the AI recognizes pareidolia better when it's trained on a more diverse set of faces, does that mean that we, humans, start seeing more faces in things as we age and have seen more living faces of all kinds? Not really. According to Hamilton, other research shows that pareidolia in humans emerges very young. One study even found that fetuses respond to face-like patterns by shining lights into the womb!
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