“A common assumption is that belief in conspiracy theories and supernatural phenomena are grounded in illusory pattern perception. in the present research we systematically tested this assumption. study 1 revealed that such irrational beliefs are related to perceiving patterns in randomly generated coin toss outcomes. in study 2, pattern search instructions exerted an indirect effect on irrational beliefs through pattern perception. study 3 revealed that perceiving patterns in chaotic but not in structured paintings predicted irrational beliefs. in study 4, we found that agreement with texts supporting paranormal phenomena or conspiracy theories predicted pattern perception. in study 5, we manipulated belief in a specific conspiracy theory. this manipulation influenced the extent to which people perceive patterns in world events, which in turn predicted unrelated irrational beliefs. we conclude that illusory pattern perception is a central cognitive mechanism accounting for conspiracy theories and supernatural beliefs.”

“People tend to see faces from non-face objects or meaningless patterns. such illusory face perception is called face pareidolia. previous studies have revealed an interesting fact that there are huge individual differences in face pareidolia experience among the population. here, we review previous findings on individual differences in face pareidolia experience from four categories: sex differences, developmental factors, personality traits and neurodevelopmental factors. we further discuss underlying cognitive or neural mechanisms to explain why some perceive the objects as faces while others do not. the individual differences in face pareidolia could not only offer scientific insights on how the brain works to process face information, but also suggest potential clinical applications.”

“Face pareidolia is the phenomenon of seeing facelike structures in everyday objects. here, we tested the hypothesis that face pareidolia, rather than being limited to a cognitive or mnemonic association, reflects the activation of visual mechanisms that typically process human faces. we focused on sensory cues to social attention, which engage cell populations in temporal cortex that are susceptible to habituation effects. repeated exposure to ‘pareidolia faces’ that appear to have a specific direction of attention causes a systematic bias in the perception of where human faces are looking, indicating that overlapping sensory mechanisms are recruited when we view human faces and when we experience face pareidolia. these cross-adaptation effects are significantly reduced when pareidolia is abolished by removing facelike features from the objects. these results indicate that face pareidolia is essentially a perceptual phenomenon, occurring when sensory input is processed by visual mechanisms that have evolved to extract specific social content from human faces.”

“Objectives: pareidolia is the interpretation of previously unseen and unrelated objects as familiar due to previous learning. the present study aimed to determine the specific brain areas that exhibited activation during real-face and face-pareidolia processing. methods: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri) scans were performed on 20 healthy subjects under real-face and face-pareidolia conditions in national magnetic resonance research center (umram), ankara, turkey from april 2016 to january 2017. fsl software was used to conduct a feat higher level (group) analysis to identify the brain areas activated during real-face and face-pareidolia processing. results: under both the real-face and face-pareidolia conditions, activation was observed in the prefrontal cortex (pfcx), occipital cortex v1, occipital cortex v2, and inferior temporal regions. also under both conditions, the same degree of activation was observed in the right fusiform face area (ffa) and the right pfcx. on the other hand, pfcx activation was not evident under the real-face versus face scrambled or face-pareidolia versus pareidolia scrambled conditions. conclusions: the present findings suggest that, as in real-face perception, face-pareidolia requires interaction between top-down and bottom-up brain regions including the ffa and frontal and occipitotemporal areas. additionally, whole-brain analyses revealed that the right pfcx played an important role in processing real faces and in face pareidolia (illusory face perception), as did the ffa.”

“Objectives: previous research has identified that dementia with lewy bodies (dlb) has abnormal pareidolic responses which are associated with severity of visual hallucinations (vh), and the pareidolia test accurately classifies dlb with vh. we aimed to assess whether these findings would also be evident at the earlier stage of mild cognitive impairment (mci) with lewy bodies (mci-lb) in comparison to mci due to ad (mci-ad) and cognitively healthy comparators. methods: one-hundred and thirty-seven subjects were assessed prospectively in a longitudinal study with a mean follow-up of 1.2 years (max = 3.7): 63 mci-lb (22% with vh) and 40 mci-ad according to current research diagnostic criteria, and 34 healthy comparators. the pareidolia test was administered annually as a repeated measure. results: probable mci-lb had an estimated pareidolia rate 1.2–6.7 times higher than mci-ad. pareidolia rates were not associated with concurrent vh, but had a weak association with total score on the north east visual hallucinations inventory. the pareidolia test was not an accurate classifier of either mci-lb (area under curve (auc) = 0.61), or vh (auc = 0.56). there was poor sensitivity when differentiating mci-lb from controls (41%) or mci-ad (27%), though specificity was better (91% and 89%, respectively). conclusions: whilst pareidolic responses are specifically more frequent in mci-lb than mci-ad, sensitivity of the pareidolia test is poorer than in dlb, with fewer patients manifesting vh at the earlier mci stage. however, the high specificity and ease of use may make it useful in specialist clinics where imaging biomarkers are not available.”

“While there are many studies on pareidolia in healthy individuals and patients with schizophrenia, to our knowledge, there are no prior studies on pareidolia in patients with bipolar disorder. accordingly, in this study, we, for the first time, measured pareidolia in patients with bipolar disorder (n = 50), and compared that to patients with schizophrenia (n = 50) and healthy controls (n = 50). we have used (a) the scene test, which consists of 10 blurred images of natural scenes that was previously found to produce illusory face responses and (b) the noise test which had 32 black and white images consisting of visual noise and 8 images depicting human faces; participants indicated whether a face was present on these images and to point to the location where they saw the face. illusory responses were defined as answers when observers falsely identified objects that were not on the images in the scene task (maximum illusory score: 10), and the number of noise images in which they reported the presence of a face (maximum illusory score: 32). further, we also calculated the total pareidolia score for each task (the sum number of images with illusory responses in the scene and noise tests). the responses were scored by two independent raters with an excellent congruence (kappa > 0.9). our results show that schizophrenia patients scored higher on pareidolia measures than both healthy controls and patients with bipolar disorder. our findings are agreement with prior findings on more impaired cognitive processes in schizophrenia than in bipolar patients.”

“Facial expressions are vital for social communication, yet the underlying mechanisms are still being discovered. illusory faces perceived in objects (face pareidolia) are errors of face detection that share some neural mechanisms with human face processing. however, it is unknown whether expression in illusory faces engages the same mechanisms as human faces. here, using a serial dependence paradigm, we investigated whether illusory and human faces share a common expression mechanism. first, we found that images of face pareidolia are reliably rated for expression, within and between observers, despite varying greatly in visual features. second, they exhibit positive serial dependence for perceived facial expression, meaning an illusory face (happy or angry) is perceived as more similar in expression to the preceding one, just as seen for human faces. this suggests illusory and human faces engage similar mechanisms of temporal continuity. third, we found robust cross-domain serial dependence of perceived expression between illusory and human faces when they were interleaved, with serial effects larger when illusory faces preceded human faces than the reverse. together, the results support a shared mechanism for facial expression between human faces and illusory faces and suggest that expression processing is not tightly bound to human facial features.”

“Migraine is a multifactorial brain disorder characterized by recurrent disabling headache attacks. one of the possible mechanisms in the pathogenesis of migraine may be a decrease in inhibitory cortical stimuli in the primary visual cortex attributable to cortical hyperexcitability. the aim of this study was to investigate the neural correlates underlying face and face pareidolia processing in terms of the event-related potential (erp) components, n170, vertex positive potential (vpp), and n250, in patients with migraine. in total, 40 patients with migraine without aura, 23 patients with migraine and aura, and 30 healthy controls were enrolled. we recorded erps during the presentation of face and face pareidolia images. n170, vpp, and n250 mean amplitudes and latencies were examined. n170 was significantly greater in patients with migraine with aura than in healthy controls. vpp amplitude was significantly greater in patients with migraine without aura than in healthy controls. the face stimuli evoked significantly earlier vpp responses to faces (168.7 ms, se = 1.46) than pareidolias (173.4 ms, se = 1.41) in patients with migraine with aura. we did not find a significant difference between n250 amplitude for face and face pareidolia processing. a significant difference was observed between the groups for pareidolia in terms of n170 [f(2,86) = 14,75, p < 0.001] and vpp [f(2,86) = 16.43, p < 0.001] amplitudes. early erps are a valuable tool to study the neural processing of face processing in patients with migraine to demonstrate visual cortical hyperexcitability.new & noteworthy event-related potentials (erps) are important for understanding face and face pareidolia processing in patients with migraine. n170, vertex positive potential (vpp), and n250 erps were investigated. n170 was revealed as a potential component of cortical excitability for face and face pareidolia processing in patients with migraine.”

“This study presents a new computer vision approach to perform affective analysis of a scene or object. the approach utilises a simulation of the phenomenon of face pareidolia that can be described as the perception of non-existent faces, for example, in random textures, clouds or rock formations. the emergence of face pareidolia in product designs and natural scenes can modulate affective perception of our everyday experiences without our conscious awareness. we propose a new deep learning method to simulate the face pareidolia ability of humans and predict associated emotional responses in two-dimensional valence and arousal space. starting from a face detector that was trained on images of human faces, we propose a novel cross-domain weakly supervised three-step progressive domain adaptation approach to simulate face pareidolia by fine-tuning the human face detector on three types of synthetically generated sample images. our approach fuses two deep network models, one model for predicting valence and arousal from abstract and minimal face-like patterns producing face pareidolia, and a second for recognising overall moods and context associated with the scene. to evaluate our approach, we constructed a new dataset containing instance-level annotations of face pareidolia occurrences as well as valence and arousal emotional values associated with the overall scene. the quantitative and qualitative experimental results of the present study demonstrate that our approach can outperform other state-of-the-art methods in face pareidolia detection as well as in predicting associated emotions.”

“Face perception in humans and nonhuman primates is rapid and accurate [1–4]. in the human brain, a network of visual-processing regions is specialized for faces [5–7]. although face processing is a priority of the primate visual system, face detection is not infallible. face pareidolia is the compelling illusion of perceiving facial features on inanimate objects, such as the illusory face on the surface of the moon. although face pareidolia is commonly experienced by humans, its presence in other species is unknown. here we provide evidence for face pareidolia in a species known to possess a complex face-processing system [8–10]: the rhesus monkey (macaca mulatta). in a visual preference task [11, 12], monkeys looked longer at photographs of objects that elicited face pareidolia in human observers than at photographs of similar objects that did not elicit illusory faces. examination of eye movements revealed that monkeys fixated the illusory internal facial features in a pattern consistent with how they view photographs of faces [13]. although the specialized response to faces observed in humans [1, 3, 5–7, 14] is often argued to be continuous across primates [4, 15], it was previously unclear whether face pareidolia arose from a uniquely human capacity. for example, pareidolia could be a product of the human aptitude for perceptual abstraction or result from frequent exposure to cartoons and illustrations that anthropomorphize inanimate objects. instead, our results indicate that the perception of illusory facial features on inanimate objects is driven by a broadly tuned face-detection mechanism that we share with other species.”

“Face pareidolia is the illusory perception of non-existent faces. the present study, for the first time, contrasted behavioral and neural responses of face pareidolia with those of letter pareidolia to explore face-specific behavioral and neural responses during illusory face processing. participants were shown pure-noise images but were led to believe that 50% of them contained either faces or letters; they reported seeing faces or letters illusorily 34% and 38% of the time, respectively. the right fusiform face area (rffa) showed a specific response when participants ‘saw’ faces as opposed to letters in the pure-noise images. behavioral responses during face pareidolia produced a classification image (ci) that resembled a face, whereas those during letter pareidolia produced a ci that was letter-like. further, the extent to which such behavioral cis resembled faces was directly related to the level of face-specific activations in the rffa. this finding suggests that the rffa plays a specific role not only in processing of real faces but also in illusory face perception, perhaps serving to facilitate the interaction between bottom-up information from the primary visual cortex and top-down signals from the prefrontal cortex (pfc). whole brain analyses revealed a network specialized in face pareidolia, including both the frontal and occipitotemporal regions. our findings suggest that human face processing has a strong top-down component whereby sensory input with even the slightest suggestion of a face can result in the interpretation of a face. © 2014 elsevier ltd.”

“The precise neural underpinnings of face pareidolia in patients with parkinson’s disease (pd) remain unclear. we aimed to clarify face recognition network abnormalities associated with face pareidolia in such patients. eighty-three patients with pd and 40 healthy controls were recruited in this study. patients with pd were classified into pareidolia and nonpareidolia groups. volumetric analyses revealed no significant differences between the pareidolia (n = 39) and nonpareidolia (n = 44) patient groups. we further observed decreased functional connectivity among regions of interest in the bilateral frontotemporal lobes in patients with pareidolia. seed-based analysis using bilateral temporal fusiform cortices as seeds revealed significantly decreased connectivity with the bilateral inferior medial prefrontal cortices in the pareidolia group. post hoc regression analysis further demonstrated that the severity of face pareidolia was negatively correlated with functional connectivity between the bilateral temporal fusiform and medial prefrontal cortices. our findings suggest that top-down modulation of the face recognition network is impaired in patients with pd experiencing face pareidolia.”

“Background and purpose: face pareidolia is described as an interpretation of any unrelated object seen for the first time as a face. it is still unclear how to face pareidolia is processed. in this study, the neural basis of face and face pareidolia processing was investigated through recording event-related potentials (erps). methods: the erps were recorded from 35 right-handed and healthy participants in response to faces and face pareidolia. amplitudes and latencies of n170, vertex-positive potential (vpp), and n250 components were analyzed, and current source density (csd) maps relevant to these components were obtained. results: n170 response was earlier and larger in response to faces compared to face pareidolias. vpp is also evoked earlier in response to faces as in the case of n170; however, the vpp amplitude was larger for face pareidolias than for faces. statistical analyses did not reveal any differences between faces and face pareidolias in terms of n250 component. conclusion: the results indicated that faces and face pareidolias are processed in the early stages of visual perception. in addition, the n250 component does not reflect the neural processing of faces and face pareidolias.”

“Background: faces convey valuable daily life social signals. as in most psychiatric conditions, non-verbal social cognition or its components including face processing may be aberrant in schizophrenia (sz). social participation of individuals with sz is vital for their quality of life, and remediation of social abilities in this population is of high relevance both for society and clinical care. method: tuning to faces in non-face images such as shadows, grilled toasts, or ink blots is called face pareidolia. humans possess high sensitivity to facial signals: even fetuses and infants are well tuned to coarse face cues. here we assessed face tuning in individuals with sz and person-by-person matched controls by using a new experimental tool, a set of food-plate images bordering on the giuseppe arcimboldo style. the key benefit of these images is that single components do not trigger face processing. results and conclusions: the outcome indicates that individuals with sz exhibit aberrant face tuning in face-like non-face images (χ2(1) = 17.44, p = 0.0001) that can hamper adaptive interaction with peers and social participation hindering, in turn, clinical remediation. face response rate in sz patients was related to the scores on the event arrangement task tapping social cognition (pearson product-moment correlation, r = 0.602, p = 0.01) and on picture completion task assessing visual perceptual organization (spearman’s rho = 0.614, p = 0.009). therefore, poor performance on the face tuning task is unlikely to be accounted for by deviant general cognitive abilities, but rather by impairments in perceptual integration and social cognition. comparison of these findings with data in autism and other neuropsychiatric conditions provides novel insights on the origins of face tuning in sz and triggers brain imaging research.”

“In parkinson’s disease (pd) patients, visual misperceptions are a major problem within the non-motor symptoms. pareidolia, i.e., the tendency to perceive a specific, meaningful image in an ambiguous visual pattern, is a phenomenon that occurs also in healthy subjects. literature suggests that the perception of face pareidolia may be increased in patients with neurodegenerative diseases. we aimed to examine, within the same experiment, face perception and the production of face pareidolia in pd patients and healthy controls (hc). thirty participants (15 pd patients and 15 hc) were presented with 47 naturalistic photographs in which faces were embedded or not. the likelihood to perceive the embedded faces was modified by manipulating their transparency. participants were asked to decide for each photograph whether a face was embedded or not. we found that pd patients were significantly less likely to recognize embedded faces than controls. however, pd patients also perceived faces significantly more often in locations where none were actually present than controls. linear regression analyses showed that gender, age, hallucinations, and multiple-choice vocabulary intelligence test (mwt) score were significant predictors of face pareidolia production in pd patients. montreal cognitive assessment (moca) was a significant predictor for pareidolia production in pd patients in trials in which a face was embedded in another region [f(1, 13) = 24.4, p = <0.001]. we conclude that our new embedded faces paradigm is a useful tool to distinguish face perception performance between hc and pd patients. furthermore, we speculate that our results observed in pd patients rely on disturbed interactions between the dorsal (dan) and ventral attention networks (van). in photographs in which a face is present, the van may detect this as a behaviourally relevant stimulus. however, due to the deficient communication with the dan in pd patients, the dan would not direct attention to the correct location, identifying a face at a location where actually none is present.”

“Background: visual hallucinations are a core clinical feature of dementia with lewy bodies (dlb), and this symptom is important in the differential diagnosis and prediction of treatment response. the pareidolia test is a tool that evokes visual hallucination-like illusions, and these illusions may be a surrogate marker of visual hallucinations in dlb. we created a simplified version of the pareidolia test and examined its validity and reliability to establish the clinical utility of this test. methods: the pareidolia test was administered to 52 patients with dlb, 52 patients with alzheimer’s disease (ad) and 20 healthy controls (hcs). we assessed the test-retest/inter-rater reliability using the intra-class correlation coefficient (icc) and the concurrent validity using the neuropsychiatric inventory (npi) hallucinations score as a reference. a receiver operating characteristic (roc) analysis was used to evaluate the sensitivity and specificity of the pareidolia test to differentiate dlb from ad and hcs. results: the pareidolia test required approximately 15 minutes to administer, exhibited good testretest/inter-rater reliability (icc of 0.82), and moderately correlated with the npi hallucinations score (rs = 0.42). using an optimal cut-off score set according to the roc analysis, and the pareidolia test differentiated dlb from ad with a sensitivity of 81% and a specificity of 92%. conclusions: our study suggests that the simplified version of the pareidolia test is a valid and reliable surrogate marker of visual hallucinations in dlb.”

“Background. parkinson’s disease is associated with impaired ability to recognize emotional facial expressions. in addition to a visual processing disorder, a visual recognition disorder may be involved in these patients. pareidolia is a type of complex visual illusion that permits the interpretation of a vague stimulus as something known to the observer. parkinson’s patients experience pareidolic illusions. n170 and n250 waveforms are two event-related potentials (erps) involved in emotional facial expression recognition. objective. in this study, we investigated how parkinson’s patients process face and face-pareidolia stimuli at the neural level using n170, vertex positive potential (vpp), and n250 components of event-related potentials. methods. to examine the response of face and face-pareidolia processing in parkinson’s patients, we measured the n170, vpp, and n250 components of the event-related brain potentials in a group of 21 participants with parkinson’s disease and 26 control participants. results. we found that the latencies of n170 and vpp responses to both face and face-pareidolia stimuli were increased along with their amplitudes, and the amplitude of n250 responses decreased in parkinson’s patients compared to the control group. in both control and parkinson’s patients, face stimuli generated greater erp amplitude and shorter latency in responses than did face-pareidolia stimuli. conclusion. the results of our study showed that erps associated with face and also face-pareidolia stimuli processing are changed in early-stage neurophysiological activity in the temporoparietal cortex of parkinson’s patients.”

“Introduction: it has been proposed that hallucinations occur because of problems with reality discrimination (when internal, self-generated cognitions are misattributed to an external, non-self source) and because of elevated levels of top-down processing. in this study, we examined whether visual reality discrimination abilities and elevated top-down processing (assessed via face pareidolia-proneness) were associated with how often non-clinical participants report visual hallucination-like experiences. methods: participants (n = 82, mean age = 23.12 years) completed a visual reality discrimination task and a face pareidolia task, as well as self-report measures of schizotypy and of the frequency of visual hallucination-like experiences. results: regression analysis demonstrated that the number of false alarms made on the visual reality discrimination task and the number of hits made on the face pareidolia task were independent predictors of the frequency of visual hallucination-like experiences. correlations between performance on the tasks and levels of schizotypy were not statistically significant. conclusions: these findings suggest that weaker visual reality discrimination abilities and elevated levels of top-down processing are associated with visual hallucination-proneness and are discussed in terms of the idea that clinical visual hallucinations and non-clinical visual hallucination-like experiences share similar cognitive mechanisms.”

“Background and aim: some patients with parkinson’s disease (pd) present with pareidolia, an illusion of a meaningless stimulus as a familiar object known to the observer. since the striatum is associated with processing of visual information, we investigated correlations of pareidolia with motor symptoms and striatal dopaminergic function. method: a noise pareidolia test, assessment of motor symptoms using mds-updrs and 123i-ioflupane spect were performed in 58 drug-naïve pd patients. a number of images in which a participant noticed an illusory face (number of illusory responses) were compared with motor assessment scores and uptake of 123i-ioflupane in the striatum. results: of the 58 participants, 22 had at least one illusory response. mean scores for mds-updrs part iii (p<0.05), rigidity (p<0.05), and rigidity on the left side of the body (p<0.01) in patients with pareidolia were significantly higher than those in patients without pareidolia. uptake of 123i-ioflupane in the right caudate nucleus (p<0.05), anterior putamen (p<0.01), and posterior putamen (p<0.01) in patients with pareidolia was significantly lower than in patients without pareidolia. in the 22 patients with pareidolia, the number of illusory responses was significantly correlated with total scores for mds-updrs part iii (r=0.443, p<0.05) and subscores for bradykinesia (r=0.440, p<0.05) and bradykinesia on the left side of the body (r=0.564, p<0.01). the prevalence of pareidolia in left-dominant parkinsonism (16/30 patients) was higher than that in right-dominant parkinsonism (6/28 patients) (p<0.05 by chi-square test). conclusion: pareidolia in pd patients is associated with dysfunction in the right striatum.”

“The human visual system has evolved specialized neural mechanisms to rapidly detect faces. its broad tuning for facial features is thought to underlie the illusory perception of faces in inanimate objects, a phenomenon called face pareidolia. recent studies on face pareidolia suggest that the mechanisms underlying face processing, at least at the early stages of visual encoding, may treat objects that resemble faces as real faces; prioritizing their detection. in our study, we used breaking continuous flash suppression (b-cfs) to examine whether the human visual system prioritizes the detection of objects that induce face pareidolia over stimuli matched for object content. similar to previous b-cfs results using real face stimuli, we found that participants detected the objects with pareidolia faces faster than object-matched control stimuli. given that face pareidolia has been more frequently reported amongst individuals prone to hallucinations, we also explored whether this rapid prioritization is intact in individuals with schizophrenia, and found evidence suggesting that it was. our findings suggest that face pareidolia engages a broadly tuned mechanism that facilitates rapid face detection. this may involve the proposed fast subcortical pathway that operates outside of visual awareness.”

“Visual images that are not faces are sometimes perceived as faces (the pareidolia phenomenon). while the pareidolia phenomenon provides people with a strong impression that a face is present, it is unclear how deeply pareidolia faces are processed as faces. in the present study, we examined whether a shift in spatial attention would be produced by gaze cueing of face-like objects. a robust cueing effect was observed when the face-like objects were perceived as faces. the magnitude of the cueing effect was comparable between the face-like objects and a cartoon face. however, the cueing effect was eliminated when the observer did not perceive the objects as faces. these results demonstrated that pareidolia faces do more than give the impression of the presence of faces; indeed, they trigger an additional face-specific attentional process.”

“Despite our fluency in reading human faces, sometimes we mistakenly perceive illusory faces in objects, a phenomenon known as face pareidolia. although illusory faces share some neural mechanisms with real faces, it is unknown to what degree pareidolia engages higher-level social perception beyond the detection of a face. in a series of large-scale behavioral experiments (ntotal = 3,815 adults), we found that illusory faces in inanimate objects are readily perceived to have a specific emotional expression, age, and gender. most strikingly, we observed a strong bias to perceive illusory faces as male rather than female. this male bias could not be explained by preexisting semantic or visual gender associations with the objects, or by visual features in the images. rather, this robust bias in the perception of gender for illusory faces reveals a cognitive bias arising from a broadly tuned face evaluation system in which minimally viable face percepts are more likely to be perceived as male.”

“Purpose: although olfactory decline and visual hallucinations are useful in distinguishing dementia with lewy bodies (dlb) from alzheimer’s disease (ad) in a clinical setting, neither is easy to evaluate objectively. the pareidolia test is used to assess susceptibility to visual hallucinations, while in japan, the odor stick identification test for the japanese (osit-j) is used to objectively quantify olfactory decline. the present study investigated the efficacy of these olfactory and pareidolia tests in differentiating ad from dlb. their usefulness was then compared with that of the indicative biomarkers in neuroimaging for a clinical diagnosis of dlb listed in the fourth consensus report of the dementia with lewy bodies consortium. methods: a total of 24 probable dlb and 22 probable ad patients were enrolled. all underwent 4 diagnostic procedures: uptake of dopamine transporter in single photon emission computed tomography (dat-spect) and meta-iodobenzylguanidine (mibg) in myocardial scintigraphy, the pareidolia test, and osit-j. the sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of these methods in differentiating dlb from ad were compared. results: sensitivity and specificity in differentiating dlb from ad were 86 and 100% by the heart-to-mediastinum ratio of mibg uptake; 82 and 96% by the specific binding ratio on dat-spect; 77 and 67% by the combination of osit-j and pareidolia test scores; 73 and 62% by the pareidolia test scores; and 77 and 58% by the osit-j scores, respectively. conclusions: the present results suggest that the pareidolia and osit-j tests may be considered before resorting to nuclear neuroimaging in the diagnosis of dlb.”

“Background: pareidolia, which is a particular type of complex visual illusion, has been reported to be a phenomenon analogous to visual hallucinations in patients with dementia with lewy bodies. however, whether pareidolia is observed in parkinson’s disease (pd) or whether there are common underlying mechanisms of these two types of visual misperceptions remains to be elucidated. methods: a test to evoke pareidolia, the pareidolia test, was administered to 53 patients with pd without dementia and 24 healthy controls. the regional cerebral metabolic rate of glucose was measured using 18f-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography in the pd patients. results: pd patients without dementia produced a greater number of pareidolic illusions compared with the controls. pareidolia was observed in all of the patients having visual hallucinations as well as a subset of those without visual hallucinations. the number of pareidolic illusions was correlated with hypometabolism in the bilateral temporal, parietal and occipital cortices. the index of visual hallucinations was correlated with hypometabolism in the left parietal cortex. a region associated with both pareidolia and visual hallucinations was found in the left parietal lobe. conclusions: our study suggests that pd patients without dementia experience pareidolia more frequently than healthy controls and that posterior cortical dysfunction could be a common neural mechanism of pareidolia and visual hallucinations. pareidolia could represent subclinical hallucinations or a predisposition to visual hallucinations in lewy body disease.”

“Faces convey primal information for our social life. this information is so primal that we sometimes find faces in non-face objects. such illusory perception is called pareidolia. in this study, using infants’ orientation behavior toward a sound source, we demonstrated that infants also perceive pareidolic faces. an image formed by four blobs and an outline was shown to infants with or without pure tones, and the time they spent looking at each blob was compared. since the mouth is the unique sound source in a face and the literature has shown that infants older than 6 months already have sound-mouth association, increased looking time towards the bottom blob (pareidolic mouth area) during sound presentation indicated that they illusorily perceive a face in the image. infants aged 10 and 12 months looked longer at the bottom blob under the upright-image condition, whereas no differences in looking time were observed for any blob under the inverted-image condition. however, 8-month-olds did not show any difference in looking time under both the upright and inverted conditions, suggesting that the perception of pareidolic faces, through sound association, comes to develop at around 8 to 10 months after birth.”

“A survey was conducted that had eighty-nine participants rank whether the front and back end styles of vehicles looked like faces or could be interpreted to convey expressions of anger. a covariance analysis of the data was performed. correlations were found between demographic information, whether participants saw the vehicles as faces (visual pareidolia), and their self-reported responses to aggressive driving behaviors. the strongest conclusion was that pareidolia, or seeing vehicles anthropomorphically, increased the likelihood of response to other aggressive drivers, whether it be aggressive or defensive action. the results improve the understanding of factors related to aggressive driving situations and road safety, and suggest further work to relate perception and emotional response in drivers.”