ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2021
A shared mechanism for facial expression in human faces and face pareidolia.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 47 citations in OpenAlex.
- Serial dependence in visual perception: A meta-analysis and review.Journal of vision · 2023Pooled it
- Face pareidolia is enhanced by 40 Hz transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) of the face perception network.Scientific reports · 2023Trial
- Time, space and feature similarity determine attractive and repulsive serial biases in trustworthiness impressions.BMC biology · 2026Article
- A smiling mouth expression modulates gaze appearance by enhancing how the eyes light up.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Parallel processing of distinct facial signals for the rapid evaluation of social agents.iScience · 2026Article
- Shared neural dynamics of facial expression processing.Cognitive neurodynamics · 2025Article
- Face pareidolia minimally engages macaque face selective neurons.Progress in neurobiology · 2025Article
- Pathophysiology of functional neurological disorder for the general neurologist.BMJ neurology open · 2025Review
- The neural basis of face pareidolia with human intracerebral recordings.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Gender perception of pareidolia faces in emergency department patients: the influence of physician gender.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Human-like face pareidolia emerges in deep neural networks optimized for face and object recognition.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Positive serial dependence in ratings of food images for appeal and calories.Current biology : CB · 2024Article
- A behavioral advantage for the face pareidolia illusion in peripheral vision.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Continuity fields enhance visual perception through positive serial dependence.Nature reviews. Psychology · 2024Article
- Dynamic brain communication underwriting face pareidolia.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Preliminary evidence of an increased susceptibility to face pareidolia in postpartum women.Biology letters · 2023Article
- Article
- Pareidolic faces receive prioritized attention in the dot-probe task.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2023Article
- A database of heterogeneous faces for studying naturalistic expressions.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Serial dependence in emotion perception mirrors the autocorrelations in natural emotion statistics.Journal of vision · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Facial expressions are vital for social communication, yet the underlying mechanisms are still being discovered. Illusory faces perceived in objects (face pareidolia) are errors of face detection that share some neural mechanisms with human face processing. However, it is unknown whether expression in illusory faces engages the same mechanisms as human faces. Here, using a serial dependence paradigm, we investigated whether illusory and human faces share a common expression mechanism. First, we found that images of face pareidolia are reliably rated for expression, within and between observers, despite varying greatly in visual features. Second, they exhibit positive serial dependence for perceived facial expression, meaning an illusory face (happy or angry) is perceived as more similar in expression to the preceding one, just as seen for human faces. This suggests illusory and human faces engage similar mechanisms of temporal continuity. Third, we found robust cross-domain serial dependence of perceived expression between illusory and human faces when they were interleaved, with serial effects larger when illusory faces preceded human faces than the reverse. Together, the results support a shared mechanism for facial expression between human faces and illusory faces and suggest that expression processing is not tightly bound to human facial features.
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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.