Dataset Information

Seeing Jesus in toast: neural and behavioral correlates of face pareidolia.

ABSTRACT: 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.

SUBMITTER: Liu J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3980010 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Seeing Jesus in toast: neural and behavioral correlates of face pareidolia.

Liu Jiangang J Li Jun J Feng Lu L Li Ling L Tian Jie J Lee Kang K

Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 20140131

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 r ...[more]

PMID: 24583223

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Project description: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.

Dataset Information

Seeing Jesus in toast: neural and behavioral correlates of face pareidolia.

Publications

Seeing Jesus in toast: neural and behavioral correlates of face pareidolia.

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