When the phenomenon of pareidolia occurs, a person can see an object with other things that resemble it. For example, foam on coffee that looks like a smile, clouds that look like rabbits, and other random events that occur.
But there's something unique: a study reveals that an illusionary face or pareidolia triggers perception beyond just seeing a face. People can also determine their age, emotional expression, and gender.
Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study authors concluded that nonhuman faces require more feminine detail to be perceived as female. For example, a candy bar depicted with only eyes and a smile is usually identified by people as male.
These results come from a large-scale behavioral experiment, over 3,800 adults from the United States, to identify the predicted gender of the illusory face. Their responses showed that people were significantly more likely to perceive inanimate objects with illusory faces as male than female. They also tend to perceive objects as young, happy, and male.
"Collectively, this suggests that the illusory faces have different emotional expressions, age, and gender," the study authors wrote.
"Our most striking observation is the strong bias to view the illusory face as male rather than female, even when a neutral option is available. If this bias is strong and reliable across observers, it has important implications for understanding how sex perception is processed in the brain. humans, especially given that these stimuli have no biological sex."
These findings, of course, have limitations and are built on experiments (albeit on a large scale). Moreover, it only uses participants from the US. Defaults or biases may differ in other locations or cultures.
So why did that happen? The exact answer remains unclear but lead author Susan Wardle highlights examples of emoji and Legos as evidence of a similar bias in our everyday lives. It often happens in both instances that the character is considered male unless some eyelashes, larger lips, makeup, or other feminine features are factored into the equation.