No. 204Psychology4 minviews 71
Published by GK Library Annex
Why the two holes of a wall socket look like a face
Your brain looks for a face first, even with just two dots and a line
You have probably spotted a face in a wall socket, the front of a car or a bell pepper cut in half. Seeing faces in objects is called pareidolia, and almost everyone experiences it. It happens because the brain is tuned to find faces extremely quickly.
Two dots and a line are enough
Objects that look like faces have something in common. Near the top there are two similar dots or holes side by side, and below them, in the middle, there is one line or hole. As long as that layout of two eyes and one mouth is there, it reads as a face even if the colour and material are completely different.
That is why socket holes, a car's headlights and front grille, or a house with two windows and a front door so often turn into faces. If the layout is tilted even slightly, it can seem to have a smiling or surprised expression too.
The brain reacts in 0.17 seconds
In an experiment by Hadjikhani's research team, published in the journal NeuroReport in 2009, the part of the brain that recognises faces responded in about 0.17 seconds when people looked at face-like objects. That was almost as fast as when they looked at real faces, and objects that did not resemble faces produced a much weaker response.
In other words, the brain has already sent a face signal before you think, "That's a socket." This is also why the sense of a face doesn't easily fade even after you know it is just an object.
Monkeys see them too, mostly as male faces
This illusion isn't limited to humans. In a study published in the journal Current Biology in 2017, rhesus monkeys also looked longer at photos of face-like objects than at photos of ordinary objects.
A study published in 2022 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found another feature. Even though faces in objects cannot have a sex, people saw them as male far more often than as female. The researchers suggested that a habit of seeing a face as male first, when there are no clear cues, may have been at work.
Better a false alarm than a miss
Why do we see faces so easily? A common explanation goes like this. Missing the face of a person or animal in the bushes could be dangerous, but mistaking a few leaves for a face costs little. So it may have paid to look for faces even a little loosely. However, this is a plausible interpretation, not a conclusion confirmed by experiments.
What is clear is that often seeing faces in objects is nothing strange. It is closer to a sign that a brain that is good at recognising faces is simply doing its usual job.
You see faces in objects because the brain finds the layout of two eyes and one mouth extremely quickly.
Notes and references · Hadjikhani et al. NeuroReport 2009; Wardle et al. PNAS 2022. Brain response to face-like objects in about 0.17 s, a rhesus monkey study (Taubert et al. Current Biology 2017) and a lean toward male faces. The evolutionary account is a hypothesis.
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