Pareidolia

Pareidolia (pronounced par-ei-do-lia)

In psychiatry and psychology, the perception of a recognizable image or meaningful pattern where none exists or is intended.

1994: From Ancient Greek παρα ((para (alongside, concurrent)) + εἴδωλον ((eídōlon (image, phantom)).  Word was invented by UFO debunker Steven Goldstein in 22 June 1994 edition of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, a publication devoted to rational, evidence-based explanations of the para-normal, magic, UFOs, conspiracies and the many crackpot notions spread by new-agers, spiritualists and other nutjobs.

Pareidolia is a form of apophenia where the mind will attempt to find connections in random events, thoughts or patterns where none actually exist. Pareidolia concentrates the visual and audio aspects of the brain in constructing a perception from a vague stimulus.  Pre-dating the actual word, in some circles in both psychology and psychiatry, it was for some decades popular to attempt to induce a form of pareidolia in a patient to be able to assess them better, most famously with the Rorschach Ink Blots.

Technically, there are two forms of pareidolia, the first, the mechanistic, where man-made objects, by mere coincidence have a resemblance to something else.  The second, the matrixed, is where natural phenomenon such as rock formations, clouds or the surfaces of planets include shapes which can be interpreted as something human, animal or supernatural and instead of being regarded as coincidental and amusing, are treated as having some inherent meaning or being evidence of some theory otherwise unsupported by any evidence.

The phenomenon of pareidolia manifests with such frequency as the identification of the human face in various structures that, given the wealth of behavioral evidence of diminished orientation towards faces as well as the presence of face perception impairments in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), interest was taken in the possibility of a relationship between the two.  Not something in which observational studies offered obvious potential, even the of design of experiments was challenging and the legacy of ASD research seemed not a guide, the underlying mechanisms of the deficits in ASD, although habitually described as “unclear” were better called “unknown”.  In ASD research, face-like object stimuli which had been shown to evoke pareidolia in TD (typically developing according defined criteria in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5; 2013) individuals were used to test the effect of a global face-like configuration on orientation and perceptual processes in young children with ASD and age-matched TD controls.  That had demonstrated TD children were more likely to look first towards upright face-like objects than children with ASD, suggesting a global face-like configuration elicit a stronger orientation bias in TD children as compared to children with ASD.

However, once focused on the stimuli, both groups spent more time exploring the upright face-like object, suggesting both perceived it as a face.  The conclusion was the result was in agreement with earlier work in the field of abnormal social orienting in ASD.  Whether variations on the approaches in ASD research would be useful in the study of pareidoila was of interest because face detection is an automatic, rapid and subconscious process, considered as a core component of the social perceptual system subtending social behaviors.  That faces can (as the illusory detection called pareidolia) be perceived in non-face stimuli, such as toast, clouds or landscapes by some while many on the ASD suffer difficulties in the perception of the real thing, did at least hint at the possibility of a link or even perhaps the need to revise the parameters of ASD.

Detecting faces in non-face stimuli may have a strong adaptive value given that from an evolutionary point of view, the cost of erroneously detecting a face in non-face stimuli might be less than failing to detect another’s face in the environment.  Pareidolia may thus be just another spectrum condition in that the perception of pareidolic faces or other shapes in a variety of surfaces or spaces may vary little between people, the difference being more the individual’s reaction and the reporting of the event(s).