Neurophysiological features of “face-pareidolia”
pareidolic face illusions, ’
What happens when people see faces in visual scenes/objects that do not contain any face representation (i.e., pareidolia)? Neuroimaging evidence demonstrates that pareidolic face illusions activate OFA/FFA and PFC, as also real faces doSpecifically, results of the present study from the Mooney test for faces show that participants in the 40Hz-tACS_PRE group were significantly less accurate in recognizing scrambled stimuli than those in the Sham and 40Hz-tACS_ON groups. In line with our expectations, given the higher rate of faces perceived in scrambled images, participants’ tendency to face pareidolia significantly increased (~ 10%) following 40 Hz stimulation. To control for the potential category-specificity of this effect, a control Mooney test for objects was conducted. Compared to the Mooney test for faces, results show that Results from the Toast test (in which pure noise images tACS effects on the Noise pareidolia test were observed 