ArticleCurrent biology : CB2017
Face Pareidolia in the Rhesus Monkey.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 57 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
57 citing papers in PubMed, 122 citations in OpenAlex.
- Face pareidolia is enhanced by 40 Hz transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) of the face perception network.Scientific reports · 2023Trial
- Have you really seen this illusory face before? Illusory faces bias recognition memory reports.Royal Society open science · 2026Article
- Realistic monkey body animation reveals an uncanny valley in macaque body perception.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- A Visual Behavioral Training Study of Categorical Face Pattern Recognition in Mice.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Parallel processing of distinct facial signals for the rapid evaluation of social agents.iScience · 2026Article
- Article
- Reframing neuroergonomics in an evolutionary and active inference context.Frontiers in neuroergonomics · 2026Article
- Attentional capture by real and illusory faces: a failure to replicate.Psychological research · 2025Article
- Neural correlates reveal separate stages of spontaneous face perception.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Social Perception of Illusory Faces: Effects of Width-to-Height Ratio, Chin Shape, and Eye-Mouth Distance.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Face pareidolia minimally engages macaque face selective neurons.Progress in neurobiology · 2025Article
- Human-like face pareidolia emerges in deep neural networks optimized for face and object recognition.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Face cells encode object parts more than facial configuration of illusory faces.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Neuronal Mechanisms Underlying Face Recognition in Non-human Primates.The Japanese psychological research · 2024Article
- Object color knowledge representation occurs in the macaque brain despite the absence of a developed language system.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Article
- Beyond faces: the contribution of the amygdala to visual processing in the macaque brain.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- A behavioral advantage for the face pareidolia illusion in peripheral vision.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- A limited visual search advantage for illusory faces.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2024Article
- Inactivation of face-selective neurons alters eye movements when free viewing faces.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Face perception in humans and nonhuman primates is rapid and accurate [1-4]. In the human brain, a network of visual-processing regions is specialized for faces [5-7]. Although face processing is a priority of the primate visual system, face detection is not infallible. Face pareidolia is the compelling illusion of perceiving facial features on inanimate objects, such as the illusory face on the surface of the moon. Although face pareidolia is commonly experienced by humans, its presence in other species is unknown. Here we provide evidence for face pareidolia in a species known to possess a complex face-processing system [8-10]: the rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta). In a visual preference task [11, 12], monkeys looked longer at photographs of objects that elicited face pareidolia in human observers than at photographs of similar objects that did not elicit illusory faces. Examination of eye movements revealed that monkeys fixated the illusory internal facial features in a pattern consistent with how they view photographs of faces [13]. Although the specialized response to faces observed in humans [1, 3, 5-7, 14] is often argued to be continuous across primates [4, 15], it was previously unclear whether face pareidolia arose from a uniquely human capacity. For example, pareidolia could be a product of the human aptitude for perceptual abstraction or result from frequent exposure to cartoons and illustrations that anthropomorphize inanimate objects. Instead, our results indicate that the perception of illusory facial features on inanimate objects is driven by a broadly tuned face-detection mechanism that we share with other species.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.