title: 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.
authors.affiliation: School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China; Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
authors.forename: Jiangang
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: School of Life Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi'an, China.
authors.forename: Jun
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Lu
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Feng
authors.affiliation: School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Ling
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: School of Life Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi'an, China; Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. Electronic address: tian@ieee.org.
authors.forename: Jie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Tian
authors.affiliation: Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. Electronic address: kang.lee@utoronto.ca.
authors.forename: Kang
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Lee
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D044466:Asian People; D001931:Brain Mapping; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000503:physiopathology; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007088:Illusions / Q000523:psychology*; D008297:Male; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000503:physiopathology; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Face pareidolia; Face processing; Fusiform face area; Top-down processing; fMRI