ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2016
Women are better at seeing faces where there are none: an ERP study of face pareidolia.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 68 citations in OpenAlex.
- Sexual dimorphism in hemispheric processing of faces in humans: A meta-analysis of 817 cases.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Pooled it
- Face pareidolia is enhanced by 40 Hz transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) of the face perception network.Scientific reports · 2023Trial
- Dynamic brain communication underlying face pareidolia in male schizophrenia.Schizophrenia (Heidelberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Social Perception of Illusory Faces: Effects of Width-to-Height Ratio, Chin Shape, and Eye-Mouth Distance.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- The neural basis of face pareidolia with human intracerebral recordings.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Sex differences in social brain neural responses in autism: temporal profiles of configural face-processing within data-driven time windows.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Dynamic brain communication underwriting face pareidolia.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Do subtle cultural differences sculpt face pareidolia?Schizophrenia (Heidelberg, Germany) · 2023Article
- A database of heterogeneous faces for studying naturalistic expressions.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Face pareidolia in male schizophrenia.Schizophrenia (Heidelberg, Germany) · 2022Article
- No common factor for illusory percepts, but a link between pareidolia and delusion tendency: A test of predictive coding theory.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Social cognition in individuals born preterm.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Brain activity underlying face and face pareidolia processing: an ERP study.Neurological sciences : official journal of the Italian Neurological Society and of the Italian Society of Clinical Neurophysiology · 2020Article
- Ocular fixations and presaccadic potentials to explain pareidolias in Parkinson's disease.Brain communications · 2020Article
- Article
- Vocal threat enhances visual perception as a function of attention and sex.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2019Article
- A machine learning approach to predict perceptual decisions: an insight into face pareidolia.Brain informatics · 2019Article
- How face blurring affects body language processing of static gestures in women and men.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2018Article
- The Biology and Evolution of the Three Psychological Tendencies to Anthropomorphize Biology and Evolution.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Review
- Social Cognition in Down Syndrome: Face Tuning in Face-Like Non-Face Images.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in 26 right-handed students while they detected pictures of animals intermixed with those of familiar objects, faces and faces-in-things (FITs). The face-specific N170 ERP component over the right hemisphere was larger in response to faces and FITs than to objects. The vertex positive potential (VPP) showed a difference in FIT encoding processes between males and females at frontal sites; while for men, the FIT stimuli elicited a VPP of intermediate amplitude (between that for faces and objects), for women, there was no difference in VPP responses to faces or FITs, suggesting a marked anthropomorphization of objects in women. SwLORETA source reconstructions carried out to estimate the intracortical generators of ERPs in the 150-190 ms time window showed how, in the female brain, FIT perception was associated with the activation of brain areas involved in the affective processing of faces (right STS, BA22; posterior cingulate cortex, BA22; and orbitofrontal cortex, BA10) in addition to regions linked to shape processing (left cuneus, BA18/30). Conversely, in the men, the activation of occipito/parietal regions was prevalent, with a considerably smaller activation of BA10. The data suggest that the female brain is more inclined to anthropomorphize perfectly real objects compared to the male brain.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.