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Paranormal and Religious Believers Are More Prone to Illusory Face Perception than
Skeptics and Non-believers
TAPANI RIEKKI*, MARJAANA LINDEMAN, MARJA ALENEFF, ANNI HALME and
ANTTI NUORTIMO
Institute of Behavioural Sciences, Division of Cognitive Psychology and Neuropsychology, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Summary: Illusory face perception, a tendency to find human-like faces where none are actually present in, for example, artifacts
or scenery, is a common phenomenon that occasionally enters the public eye. We used two tests (N = 47) to analyze the relationship
between paranormal and religious beliefs and illusory face perception. In a detection task, the participants detected face-like
features from pictures of scenery and landscapes with and without face-like areas and, in a rating task, evaluated the face-likeness
and emotionality of these areas. Believer groups were better at identifying the previously defined face-like regions in the images
but were also prone to false alarms. Signal detection analysis revealed that believers had more liberal answering criteria
than skeptics, but the actual detection sensitivity did not differ. The paranormal believers also evaluated the artifact faces
as more face-like and emotional than the skeptics, and a similar trend was found between religious and non-religious people.
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
INTRODUCTION
Everysooften,peopleclaimtofind the face or figure of a
religious character or other important person in peculiar
places, for example, on toasted bread. These findings are
even reported in the news, and the items are sold on eBay.
Although most of us can identify the shapes claimed,
reactions vary from serious wonder about the supposed
miracle to ignorance of these figures and disbelief in their
importance. These intriguing, funny, and often surprising
perceptions of human shapes can happen in unexpected
situations and have even ended up in a scientific journal, in
the case of the face of a sick man peering out of an ultrasound
image (Roberts & Touma, 2011). The present study examines
the role that religious and other paranormal beliefs may play
in illusory face detection.
Research on reports of seeing a face where no face
actually exists is scarce. In a recent study, illusory face
detection was found to be relatively high even in pure noise
images, with face detection rates as high as 41% (Rieth, Lee,
Lui, Tian, & Huber, 2011). The same study also suggested
that illusory face perception is highly affected by top-down
processes (i.e., expectations and previous experiences),
not only by bottom-up processes, such as visual input. In
another study, two participants tried to detect smiles on
faces with mouth areas consisting of white noise (Gosselin
& Schyns, 2003). Illusory detection varied from relatively
low to high: from 7% to 48%. These studies suggest that
even when only noise is present, false perceptions of faces
or facial parts are common.
Krummenacher, Mohr, Haker, and Brugger (2010) showed
that people who believe in paranormal phenomena errone-
ously identified faces in scrambled configurations more
often than skeptics did. Other studies have also shown that
paranormal believers are prone to perceive meaningful
patterns in ambiguous stimuli in, for example, semantic or
visual tasks (Brugger et al., 1993; Giannotti, Mohr, Pizzagalli,
Lehman, & Brugger, 2001). It can thus be expected that
illusory face recognition is more typical for paranormal
believers than for skeptics.
Illusory face detection can be considered, in a liberal sense,
as a form of anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism, in a
strict sense, denotes the belief that nonhuman phenomena
have uniquely human properties, such as a sense of humor.
However, nowadays the concept is often used more liberally
in connection with attributes that may apply to animals
as well (e.g., a belief that God is an intentional agent;
Boyer, 1996) or without an assumption of a genuine belief
(‘My computer is grouchy today’).
Cognitive scientists of religion have suggested that
anthropomorphism explains people’s inclination to believe in
gods (Barrett, 2000; Guthrie, 1993). The few available studies
about the relationship between individual anthropomorphism
and religiosity surprisingly propose that this is not the case.
Shtulman (2008) found that the more a person believed in
a supernatural being, the less it was described with such
human attributes as awake, honest, talkative, and skinny.
Similarly, perceiving such properties as anger, maliciousness,
wisdom, and self-confidence in pictures of a tree and a volcano
is not connected to religious beliefs but rather to other
paranormal beliefs (Norenzayan, Hanse, & Cady, 2008).
Anthropomorphism is characterized as a process where the
highly accessible, early developing, and fundamental
knowledge about human agents serves as an inductive base
that is applied to nonhuman targets (Epley, Waytz, &
Cacioppo, 2007; Guthrie, 1993). Therefore, it is possible that
an association between religiosity and anthropomorphism is
more apparent in basic social processes functional early in
development and crucial in dealing with other people, such
as face detection (Beauchamp & Anderson, 2010), than in
less fundamental and later developing human attributes such
as talkativeness and self-confidence.
We examined illusory face detection with artifact face
pictures and non-face pictures. Artifact face pictures are
pictures of artifacts and scenes in which face-like features
*Correspondence to: Tapani Riekki, Institute of Behavioral Sciences, Division
of Cognitive Psychology and Neuropsychology, P.O. Box 9, 00014 University
of Helsinki, Finland.
E-mail: tapani.riekki@helsinki.fi
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Applied Cognitive Psychology,Appl. Cognit. Psychol. (2012)
Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/acp.2874
such as eyes and a mouth might be perceived even though the
picture includes no actual faces or people. The hypotheses
were tested with two tasks: the perception of human faces in
artifacts and the rating of the face-likeness and emotionality
of the faces. Two hypotheses were set: (1) paranormal
believers and religious people are more prone to illusory
face perception than skeptics and non-religious people are
and (2) paranormal believers and religious people rate
artifact faces as more face-like and emotional than skeptics
and non-religious people do.
METHOD
Participants
A total of 47 (26 women, 21 men, mean age = 31 years,
range 20–50 years) healthy participants with normal or
corrected to normal vision were included in the study. The
participants were recruited from various electronic mailing
lists (e.g., university students’lists), internet forums (e.g., a
skeptic’s association), notice boards (e.g., at an esoteric
bookstore), and with the snowball method. The participants
had 29 different occupations, and 39% of them either
were university students or university graduates. To obtain
participants from the opposite ends of the paranormal
beliefs continuum, two different advertisements were used.
These were otherwise identical, but in the first advertisement
we emphasized that we are looking for participants who view
the paranormal positively or believe that there is an invisible
spiritual world; in the other, we stated that we were looking
for participants who are skeptical about the existence of
paranormal phenomena. The participants received personal
feedback from a questionnaire about their thinking style as
a reward. We also asked the participants whether they were
familiar with the idea of artifact faces and if they had, for
example, visited internet pages dedicated to the phenomena.
Familiarity did not predict performance in any of the tasks
(all p’s>.50).
Originally 73 people were recruited for the study. The distri-
bution of paranormal and religious beliefs was found to be
strongly skewed, which was probably due to the emphasis
on skepticism or paranormal beliefs in the recruitment process.
Only those belonging to the upper and lower quartiles (25%)
were included in the analyses: paranormal believers (N=19,
mean age = 34 years) and skeptics (N= 20, mean age = 28
years); religious people (N= 20, mean age =34 years) and
non-religious people (N= 19, mean age = 27 years). We
focused on the more extreme groups to avoid a possible
qualitative difference between mild and strong believers:
believers who hold mild or medium strength beliefs may be
habitual believers, not true believers or skeptics (Vyse,
1997). Paranormal beliefs and religiousness correlated
strongly with each other, r= .84, p<.001, and 30 participants
who were categorized either as paranormal believers or as
skeptics were also categorized as religious and non-religious,
respectively. Thus, even though we speak separately about
paranormal and religious believers (or skeptics and non-
believers), the groups overlapped.
Religious and paranormal beliefs were assessed with
Tobacyk’s (2004) Revised Paranormal Belief Scale. The
scale includes 26 items. The four items that measure
traditional religious beliefs (e.g., ‘I believe in God’) were used
to measure religiosity (Cronbach’sa= .85). Twenty items
addressing beliefs in psi, superstition, spiritualism, extraor-
dinary life forms, and precognition were used to measure
non-religious paranormal beliefs (a= .96; e.g., ‘Astrology
is a way to accurately predict the future’,‘Aperson’s
thoughts can influence the movement of a physical object’).
The questions were answered with a five-point scale
(1 = strongly disagree,5=strongly agree). Two items
concerning the possibility of extraterrestrial life and witches
were removed because several participants reported
interpreting them in a non-paranormal way. The questionnaire
was completed after the experimental part of the study. Prior to
the experiment, the participants signed an informed consent
form and were given a short briefing about the study, including
information regarding ethical issues and the flow of the study.
A longer description of the study was given at the end.
Stimuli
The stimuli pictures were chosen in several steps. First,
28 color photographs were chosen from existing private
photographs of the authors that fit the requirements for the
stimuli. Then, we took additional photographs to complete
a set of 150 color photographs of artifact faces and 100
non-face pictures. All of the artifact face pictures had a
face-like area where, at the minimum, eyes and a mouth
could be perceived. The faces in the pictures were evenly
distributed to different areas of the photographs. Some
of the artifact pictures were staged, such as office tools
arranged on a table, whereas others were natural, such as
a rock wall. The pictures depicted items, objects, and places
such as furniture, rooms, buildings, and landscapes. No
humans or animals were in the pictures. When possible,
the artifact face picture had a control non-face picture
with the same setting, theme, and light, taken by the same
camera (see Figure 1 for examples). In the non-face
pictures, there were no face-like areas. To keep the pictures
as natural as possible, they were not converted or adjusted
in any way except for resizing them to 640 640 pixels.
Next, four people rated whether they were able to detect
faces in the artifact face pictures and in the non-face pictures.
If three raters agreed upon the same face area, the picture
was added to the artifact face set. Also, to define the artifact
face areas in the pictures, all of the raters estimated the oppo-
site top and bottom corners of the perceived face area, and
the box calculated from the average of these values was then
used as a hit box area for the face in the detection task. If any
of the raters reported a face-like area in a non-face picture,
the picture was discarded. A total of 124 artifact face pictures
and 99 non-face pictures were chosen to pilot the study.
A pilot test with 10 participants (mean age 32 years, seven
women) was conducted to test and choose the pictures for
the main study. Half of the participants took the test in a
laboratory and the rest with a laptop computer in various
places using the same procedure as in the main study, which
is described in the succeeding text. Thirty-eight pictures in
which everyone had perceived an artifact face were excluded
along with one picture in which no one had perceived a face.
T. Riekki et al.
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Appl. Cognit. Psychol. (2012)
Twelve non-face pictures were rejected because of ambiguities.
The rest of the 98 artifact face pictures were used in the
detection and rating task along with the 87 non-face pictures
in the detection task.
The detection task
The detection task was done in a dimmed laboratory with a PC
and a Samsung 22" 1440x 900 LCD screen. The stimuli were
presented with Neurobehavioral Systems Inc.’sPRESENTATION
W
14.1 software. The participants sat 60 cm from the screen.
The viewing angle was not restricted, and answering was
done with a mouse. The background color of the screen
was gray throughout the study.
The participants read the instructions for the study from a
computer screen. The test started with practice sections that
taught the answering method and the idea of artifact faces.
Because of the rapid pace of the test, participants were
instructed to be fast but as precise as possible. The first
practice section consisted of six small green squares. The
participants had to point to each square and click on it as
quickly and precisely as possible, after which the next one
would be shown. In the second part, the six squares were
shown again but now only for 1000 ms each, and the
participants had to point to and click on the area in which
they had seen the square.
In the third section, six artifact faces and two non-face
pictures were used. To exemplify a range of artifact faces,
pictures were chosen from the pilot study on the basis of their
relative difficulty, from easy to difficult. The participants were
instructed to try to find a face-like area in the pictures. If
they found one, they were to point with the mouse to the
approximate location of the middle of the face, that is, the
nose, and press the left mouse button. If there was no
face-like area, they were instructed to press the right mouse
button. The answering time was not restricted, and the
pictures were presented one by one. To give feedback to
the participants, the target picture was presented again after
every answer, for both right and wrong answers, with the
face-like area circled or with an X in the middle of the picture
for non-face pictures. The fourth practice section used the
same procedure and instructions as the main task, which is
described next, but like the third section had only two
non-face pictures and six artifact face pictures.
In the main experiment, the participants were instructed to
try to find face-like areas from randomly shown 98 artifact
face pictures and 87 non-face pictures. If they found one, they
were to point with the mouse to the approximate location of
the middle of the face and press the left mouse button. If there
was no face-like area, they were instructed to press the right
mouse button. The main task proceeded in the following
way. First, a fixation cross was shown for 1000 ms. Second,
a picture was shown for 1000 ms. Third, a mouse cursor
appeared on the screen to be used for answering with an
answering time of 4000 ms. Because the pictures were
smaller than the whole screen, mouse clicks were made
on a highlighted gray area that replaced the area of the
pictures, as the picture was not shown during the time given
for answering. After the answer was given or if the participant
did not answer within the given answering time, the test
continued automatically to the next fixation cross.
The variables for the hit and miss rates for the artifact
faces and non-face pictures were calculated in the following
way. For the artifact faces, left mouse clicks (‘yes, there is a
face-like area in the picture’) were coded as hits if the answer
was given in the previously defined face area of the picture,
and all right clicks (‘no, there is no face-like area’) were
coded as misses. If the area clicked when answering ‘yes’
was outside the previously defined face area, the answer
was coded as yes-miss. For the non-face pictures, all left
mouse clicks (‘yes’) were coded as false alarms and right
mouse clicks (‘no’)ascorrect rejections. Non-responses
for both types of pictures were coded as non-responses
(no group differences were found, both p’s>.249). The
internal consistency of the test was good for both the artifact
faces (a= .93) and the non-face pictures (a= .98).
Figure 1. Artifact faces. Two pictures of artifact faces (first row) and control pictures (second row)
Illusory faces and paranormal beliefs
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Appl. Cognit. Psychol. (2012)
The rating task
In the rating task, presented after a short break following the
detection task, the participants rated the face-likeness and
emotionality of the artifact face pictures using a visual analog
scale and a mouse. The instruction was as follows: ‘Next you
will be shown pictures in which a face-like area can or cannot
be found. Rate the possible face-like areas using the following
scales.’The participants were asked to indicate how face-like
the artifact face was (the left end of the scale = ‘not at all’,
coded as 0; the right end = ‘alot’, coded as 170) and how
emotional the face was (the left end = negative, coded
as 170; the middle = no emotion, coded as 0; the right
end = positive, coded as 170). To obtain a score for the
perceived strength of the emotion, only the absolute value of
the rating was used (0–170). Answering was done by moving
the cursor along the visual analogical scale and pressing the
left mouse button. If the participant thought that there was
no face-like area in the picture, they were instructed to press
the right button (this answer was coded as 0). The first picture
was a practice picture taken from the detection task’spractice
section and was not used in the analyses. The artifact face
pictures and the setting were the same as in the detection task.
The pictures were presented randomly, without a time limit,
one by one with the answering scale and the question. Two
variables, face-likeness (a=.98) and emotionality (a= .95),
were formed from the ratings.
RESULTS
We used signal detection analysis (Green & Swets, 1966;
Macmillan & Creelman, 2005) to analyze the results of the
detection task because it enables the correction of the hit
rate with the false-alarm rate, revealing actual detection
sensitivity. ‘Yes’answers for artifact faces and false-alarm
rates for non-face pictures were calculated and used to
calculate two variables based on signal detection analysis:
sensitivity d0(perceptual sensitivity) and the criterion C
(bias towards the answer ‘yes’). For all means, see Table 1.
Analyses of variances and covariance were conducted
between the paranormal believers and skeptics and the
religious and non-religious people between all the variables.
Age was added as a covariate in the analysis because
the paranormal believers were older than the skeptics,
F(1,37) = 6.45, p= .015,
p
2
= .148, the religious people
were older than the non-religious, F(1,37) = 10.01,
p= .003,
p
2
= .213, and because age correlated with
misses for artifact faces in the fast-paced detection task,
r= .24, p= .044.
The religious people had more false alarms in non-face
pictures, F(1,36) = 6.34, p= .016,
p
2
= .150, but also
more hits in predetermined face areas in artifact face pictures,
F(1,36) = 10.15, p=.003,
p
2
= .220, than the non-religious
people had. Similarly, the paranormal believers had more
false alarms in non-face pictures, F(1,36) = 7.95, p= .008,
p
2
= .181, and more hits in the predetermined artifact face
areas, F(1,36) = 9.99, p=.003,
p
2
= .217, than the skeptics
had. Regarding sensitivity d0, neither the comparison between
the paranormal believers and skeptics nor the comparison
between the religious and non-religious people was statistically
significant (both p0s>.225). There were, however, group
differences in response criterion C. The paranormal
believers had a lower criterion than the skeptics had,
F(1,36) = 11.02, p= .002,
p
2
= .234, and the religious believers
lower than the non-religious people, F(1,36) = 6.06, p= .019,
p
2
= .144. No group difference was found in the yes-miss
answers, between the religious and non-religious people,
F(1,36) = 2.93, p= .095,
p
2
= .075, nor between the paranormal
believers and the skeptics, F(1,36) = 2.10, p= .156,
p
2
= .055.
Age had a significant independent effect on the response
criterion and hit rate; the older participants had less hits and a
lower criterion value than the younger participants had in
both group comparisons between the believer groups.
Between the religious and non-religious people, the group
differences were not statistically significant without
controlling for age. Regarding the paranormal believers
and skeptics, all statistically significant differences were also
significant without controlling for age, except for the hit rate
on artifact faces.
To approximate whether the believer groups were better
than non-believers at identifying the previously defined
face-like regions in the images, analyses of covariance were
conducted with age as a covariate. The number of correct
location identifications divided by the sum of correct and
incorrect location identifications for all trials where
participants reported detecting a face was the dependent vari-
able. The results showed that paranormal believers scored higher
(M= 90) than skeptics did (M=87), F(1,36) = 6.01, p= .019,
p
2
= .143, and that religious people scored higher (M= 90)
than non-religious people did (M= 86), F(1,36) = 5.26,
p= .028,
p
2
= .127.
In the rating task, the paranormal believers rated the
artifact faces as more face-like, F(1,37) = 6.25, p=.017,
p
2
= .145, and emotional, F(1,37) = 4.70, p= .037,
p
2
= .113,
Table 1. Means and standard deviations of all variables in the different groups
Paranormal
believers Skeptics
Religious
believers
Non-religious
people
Hit rates in predetermined artifact face areas 0.52 (0.13) 0.46 (0.12) 0.51 (0.12) 0.48 (0.12)
Yes-miss answers given outside the predetermined artifact face areas 0.05 (0.03) 0.07 (0.05) 0.06 (0.03) 0.08 (0.06)
False alarms for non-face pictures 0.16 (0.10) 0.10 (0.07) 0.15 (0.10) 0.10 (0.07)
Correct rejections for non-face pictures 0.84 (0.10) 0.90 (0.07) 0.85 (0.10) 0.90 (0.07)
Sensitivity d01.30 (0.38) 1.45 (0.31) 1.33 (0.36) 1.33 (0.36)
Response criterion C0.43 (0.34) 0.67 (0.39) 0.47 (0.34) 0.62 (0.38)
Face-likeness in the rating task 110 (50) 72 (44) 101 (51) 79 (39)
Emotionality in the rating task 54 (18) 42 (14) 51 (18) 45 (15)
T. Riekki et al.
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Appl. Cognit. Psychol. (2012)
than the skeptics did. In contrast, the religious people
and non-religious people rated the face-likeness of the
pictures equally, F(1,37) = 2.29, p= .139,
p
2
= .058, and
no difference was found for emotionality ratings either,
F(1,37) = 1.03, p=.318,
p
2
= .027.
DISCUSSION
The religious people saw artifact faces in pictures of, for
example, rocks, landscapes, and lifeless material objects more
often than the non-religious people did. Similarly, the people
who believed in other paranormal phenomena (e.g., astrology
and telepathy) detected faces in the artifacts more often than
the skeptics did. Supporting Hypothesis 2, the paranormal
believers also regarded these face-like areas as more face-like
than the skeptics did and assigned more extreme emotions to
them. A similar trend was found between the religious and
non-religious people, but the differences were not significant.
Moreover, compared with the non-believers and skeptics, the
religious and paranormal believers not only detected faces
more often when they were actually present, but in line with
Hypothesis 1, they also saw more faces in pictures without
any face-like patterns.
Signal detection analysis revealed that the participant
groups did not differ in their sensitivity in detecting faces
but that the paranormal and religious believers had a reduced
criterion for approving the presence of a face, reflected in the
low number of misses at the expense of high false alarm
rates. The believers’tendency to report seeing faces regard-
less of whether there were faces or not implies that they were
susceptible to the suggestion that faces may be present, on
the basis of, for example, a ‘yea-saying’tendency, the
priming effect of the practice items, or on a confirmation bias,
which has been shown to be common among paranormal
believers (Hergovich, 2003; Wiseman, Greening, &
Smith, 2003). As such, the results are in line with earlier
findings that paranormal believers are more prone to find
patterns in noisy or ambiguous stimuli than other people
are (e.g., Brugger et al., 1993; Giannotti et al., 2001; Krum-
menacher et al., 2010) and that paranormal beliefs are asso-
ciated with a tendency to jump to conclusions on the basis
of inadequate evidence (Blagrove, French, & Jones, 2006;
Brugger & Graves, 1997).
However, it might be possible that the results are not only
due to these factors alone because the way in which the
paranormal and religious believers detected faces was not
indiscriminate. Whereas in a typical signal detection design,
the participants are simply asked to answer yes or no, in the
present study they also had to point to the area where the face
was. Interestingly, the paranormal and religious believers
were more likely to find the face-like areas than the skeptics
and non-believers were: the group differences that were
found were in these hits, not in the yes answers given outside
the predetermined face areas. However, it is possible that the
believer groups identified the location of more faces simply
because they had the opportunity to do so as they reported
detecting faces overall more than non-believers. Therefore,
in future studies, believers’detection of face-like pictures
should be tested with a design where participants are always
asked to make location responses.
As a whole, the results hint at the possibility that the
believers may be overly sensitive to social information and
that only a small amount of information is sufficient to
activate their social information processing. This possibility
would be consistent with the arguments that these beliefs,
like anthropomorphism, stem from the capacity to recognize
and understand human beings (Epley et al., 2007). Theoretical
arguments (e.g., Bering, 2006; Bloom, 2007; Kelemen, 2004)
and empirical findings (e.g., Lindeman & Aarnio, 2007;
Lindeman et al., 2008; Svedholm, Lindeman, & Lipsanen,
2010) suggest that paranormal and religious believers
stretch universally and early developing human attributes,
such as beliefs, desires, and intentional purpose, to inappro-
priate realms. It has also been suggested that processing
information relating to human beings is a fundamental
dimension of domain-specific cognition that comes in degrees
in the general population, ranging from underdeveloped
to hyperdeveloped (i.e., exaggerated) social cognition
(e.g., Baron-Cohen, Knickmeyer, & Belmonte, 2005;
Crespi & Badcock, 2008). Considering the theoretically
plausible link between social information processing skills
and paranormal and religious beliefs, it could be useful to
study their association more closely in future studies.
In the introduction, we suggested that detecting faces
in artifacts with no face-like patterns is one form of
anthropomorphism. For the present, theoretical arguments
have mostly focused on anthropomorphism as a determinant
of belief in gods and other spirits (Barrett, 2000; Guthrie,
1993), but empirical findings have been rare and inconclusive
(e.g., Norenzayan et al., 2008; Shtulman, 2008), most
probably because of the myriad of ways the concept of
anthropomorphism can be operationalized. Our results
suggest that both religiosity and paranormal beliefs are
associated with anthropomorphism and that the tendency
to attribute human qualities to nonhuman phenomena may
extend to face perception as well.
Illusory face perception, a phenomenon often in the
public eye, was here studied with as natural stimuli as
possible, which has advantages and disadvantages. The
pictures were chosen for their naturalness to ensure face
validity: we tried to use stimuli as close to real-life situa-
tions as possible. On the other hand, this limits control over
the images. For example, a more controlled psychophysical
approach with an equal number of non-face and face
pictures could be used to investigate more precisely
where the group differences lie at the perceptional level.
Using receiver operating characteristics (see, for example,
Macmillan & Creelman, 2005) could further highlight the
relation of sensitivity and the response criterion. Also, to
rule out a possible response bias in the rating task, a control
condition of non-face pictures could be used. It should also
be noted that the paranormal believers were here partly
the same participants as the religious individuals (or the
skeptics and non-religious participants, respectively), and
it could be useful to use more diverse groups of paranormal
and religious believers in the future.
One thing that we learned during the research was that
illusory face perception is a pervasive phenomenon. It was
Illusory faces and paranormal beliefs
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Appl. Cognit. Psychol. (2012)
hard to find pictures of artifact faces that were difficult
enough to detect but still realistic because most of the faces
were so self-evident. Thus, the line between when a pattern
is face-like and when it is not is challenging to draw, and
as our results show, that line may be in a different place
for different individuals. To conclude, we may all be biased
to perceive human characteristics where none exist, but
religious and paranormal believers perceive them even more
than do others.
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