NASA’s Viking 1 Orbitersent back a series of images from Mars that would spark one of the most enduring mysteries in space exploration: the Face on Mars. Captured in the Cydonia region, this peculiar ...

Other instances include seeing the image of the Man on the Moon, the figure of Jesus in a piece of toast (Liu et al, 2014) or a face in cloud formations, and the fruit, vegetables, books, and ...

It’s pretty common to see face-like patterns in objects – but this quirk can give us insights into human psychology and evolution.

Reseachers developed a new dataset and models to study face pareidolia, exploring the gap between human and machine face detection and how animal faces enhance pareidolia detection in AI systems.

True believers in the face on Mars had fallen prey to a psychological phenomenon called pareidolia, our brain’s tendency to impose a recognizable pattern on a visual stimulus.

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!

Humans see the face of an old man in the knots of a tree, the shape of an animal in the clouds, the man on the moon. There's a word for that phenomenon: pareidolia.

What is pareidolia, you might wonder? Well, first of all, it’s pronounced “paria – dolya” and it’s a psychological phenomenon of seeing patterns, objects or meaning in ambiguous stimuli.

Oxytocin may be responsible for new mothers' heightened ability to see faces in inanimate objects, but more research is needed.

Other instances include seeing the image of the Man on the Moon, the figure of Jesus in a piece of toast (Liu et al, 2014) or a face in cloud formations, and the fruit, vegetables, books, and ...