This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin.It’s probably happened to you.You look at a parking meter or a pickle slice or the foam in your cup of cappuccino and you think, hey, that looks like a face.It’s a phenomenon called pareidolia and it’s something we humans tend to do.Now, a new study suggests we also do something else: we tend to see those illusory faces as having a gender and most often we think they’re male.The finding appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Growing up my sister Jenny and I had our own word for examples of face pareidolia: “beezups.”Susan Wardle, a cognitive neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda.Her term is total nonsense. But Wardle must have felt some connection with beezups.As a grownup, she set out to study them after a conversation she had with her colleague Jessica Taubert.We were talking about face neurons in the brain, which respond preferentially to images of faces.But they also sometimes respond to pictures of round objects, such as apples or clocks.That reminded us of the experience of seeing faces in objects.And we thought it would be fun to find out whether the face regions of the brain respond to illusory faces in a similar way to real faces.Indeed, in an earlier study, they found that the same brain regions activated by actual human faces were also triggered by faux faces in inanimate objects, like potatoes or teapots or washing machines.
