Facing your expectations: Perceived characteristics of illusory faces in symmetrical visual noise

Face pareidolia, the perception of illusory faces in everyday objects, often includes social characteristics like gender, age, and emotion. However, it is unclear whether the characteristics of object face pareidolia are influenced by selection bias and/or the semantic characteristics of object images. The current study utilises static and dynamic synthetic visual noise —an evocative but minimal stimulus—to examine the social characteristics associated with pareidolic faces in an unbiased way. Experiment 1 (N = 40) directly compared face pareidolia in objects and static, vertically symmetrical noise, finding social traits in both. Faces in synthetic noise appeared older and angrier than those seen in objects. Experiment 2 (N = 30) examined pareidolia in symmetrical and random dynamic noise, showing similar results to static noise. Our results provide ‘context-free’ insight into the perceptual and cognitive biases that influence the processing of ambiguous stimuli in human vision.