Tag Archive for 'Pareidolia'

Upper Paleolithic drawing of the partial outline of a horse that uses the natural edge of the wall of La Pasiega Cave to represent the back and head of the horse. Image credit: Izzy Wisher / Gobierno de Cantabria.

Pareidolia May Have Stimulated Paleolithic Humans to Make Cave Art

Sep 25, 2023 by News Staff

Durham University archaeologist Izzy Wisher and colleagues investigated whether pareidolia — a psychological phenomenon where people see meaningful...

This image was taken by Mastcam onboard NASA’s Curiosity rover on Sol 3466 (May 7, 2022 at 07:58:16 UTC). Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS.

Did Curiosity Rover Find ‘Doorway’ on Mars?

May 30, 2022 by The Conversation

On May 7, 2022, the Mast camera (Mastcam) onboard NASA’s Curiosity rover took a photo which appeared to show a doorway carved into the Martian rock. This...

Eight illusory face images from the total set of 256 images which illustrate images from different gender, age, and emotion categories. Image credit: Wardle et al., doi: 10.1073/pnas.2117413119.

Pareidolia Faces More Likely to be Perceived as Male than Female, New Study Reveals

Jan 31, 2022 by News Staff

Despite our fluency in reading human faces, sometimes we mistakenly perceive illusory faces in objects, a phenomenon known as face pareidolia. In a new...

NASA’s Viking 1 orbiter photographed the Cydonia region in the northern latitudes of Mars on July 25, 1976 while searching for a landing site for the Viking 2 lander. The speckled appearance of the image is due to missing data, called bit errors, caused by problems in transmission of the photographic data from Mars to Earth. Bit errors comprise part of one of the ‘eyes’ and ‘nostrils’ on the eroded rock that resembles a human face near the center of the image. Shadows in the rock formation give the illusion of a nose and mouth. Planetary geologists attribute the origin of the formation to purely natural processes. The feature is 1.5 km across, with the Sun angle at approximately 20 degrees. The picture was taken from a range of 1,873 km. Image credit: NASA / JPL.

Study: Face Pareidolia Reflects Activation of Same Visual Mechanisms that Process Real Human Faces

Aug 17, 2020 by News Staff

Face pareidolia is the phenomenon of seeing face-like structures in everyday objects. It is a very human condition that relates to how our brains are wired....