Why do humans see faces in everyday objects

Human beings are Finding patterns in inanimate objects, especially facial champions—think of the famous “face on Mars” in images taken by the Viking 1 orbiter in 1976. This is essentially a trick of light and shadow.People always find what they think is Face of jesus In toast and many others (a lot of) General food. There is even one (now no longer exists) Twitter account Committed to planning images of the phenomenon of “faces in things”.

The fancy name for this phenomenon is facial hallucinations. Scientists at the University of Sydney have discovered that not only can we see faces in everyday objects, our brains can even process the emotional expression of objects in the same way as real faces, instead of treating objects as “false” detections and discarding them. This sharing mechanism may have developed due to the need to quickly determine whether a person is a friend or an enemy.The Sydney team describes their work A recent paper Published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

David Alais, the lead author of the University of Sydney, tell protector:

We are such a complex social species, and face recognition is very important…you need to identify who it is, family, friend or enemy, what are their intentions and emotions? The face detection speed is very fast. The brain seems to use a template matching program to do this. Therefore, if it sees an object that seems to have two eyes above the nose above the mouth, then it will say, “Oh, I saw a face.” It is a bit quick and loose, and sometimes makes mistakes, so it resembles a human face. Something often triggers this kind of template matching.

Alais has been interested in this and related topics for many years.For example, in a 2016 papers Published on Scientific report, Alais and his colleagues build on previous studies involving rapid facial sequences, which showed that the perception of facial identity and attractiveness is biased toward the most recently seen faces. Therefore, they designed a binary task that mimics the selection interface in online dating sites and apps (such as Tinder), where users swipe left or right to respond to whether they think the profile picture of a potential partner is attractive. Ales et al. Many stimulating attributes—including orientation, facial expressions and attractiveness, as well as the slimness of online dating profiles—were found to be systematically biased toward recent past experiences.

Followed by 2019 paper inside Vision Magazine, which one Extended experimental method Our appreciation of art. Alais and his co-authors discovered that we do not evaluate every painting we see in a museum or gallery based on our own merits. They also found that we are prone to “contrast effects”: that is, if the work we have seen before is not so aesthetically appealing, we will consider a painting more attractive. On the contrary, the research shows that our appreciation of art exhibits the same systematic prejudice of “continuous dependence”. If we look at them after seeing another attractive painting, we will consider them more attractive, and if the previous paintings are not aesthetically attractive, we will consider them less attractive.

The next step is to examine the specific brain mechanisms behind how we “read” social information from other people’s faces. Alais believes that the phenomenon of facial hallucinations is related. “A distinguishing feature of these objects is that they not only look like faces, but they can even convey a socially meaningful personality,” He says, Such as a sliced ​​bell pepper that seems to be frowning or a towel dispenser that seems to be smiling.

Facial perception involves more than just the common features of all human faces, such as the position of the mouth, nose, and eyes. Our brains may evolve to adapt to these common patterns, but reading social information needs to be able to determine whether someone is happy, angry, or sad, or whether they are paying attention to us. Based on a study, Alais’ team designed a sensory adaptation experiment and determined that we do deal with facial hallucinations in roughly the same way as real faces. Papers published last year In “Psychological Science” magazine.