Processing visual ambiguity in fractal patterns: Pareidolia as a sign of creativity

A new test for assessing creative flexibility of perceptual interpretation: The figural interpretation quest.

“…Also, as hypothesized, we found that the degree of originality that participants demonstrated in responding to the FIQ was significantly positively associated with the two open-ended product-ideation tasks similar to those that might be required in innovative design or creative industry (generating product ideas to improve the experience of urban gardening, and of outdoor picnics). Collectively, the current findings provide convergent support to recent emphases on the important contribution of perceptual flexibility (and ambiguity) to creative ideation, but notably also extend findings such as those of Pepin et al (2022) beyond self-reported creativity and semantic flexibility, to performance-based assessments of the originality of ideas generated during multiple creative and design-related tasks.…”

“…Additionally, the FIQ and PMT can both readily be administered during neuroimaging, providing the opportunity to extend the generalizability of findings relating to divergent thinking to more perceptually based, less verbal, and more novel stimuli, beyond the largely conceptually based and frequently used AUT—which is also often already familiar to participants, and thus may elicit “old” (i.e., remembered) responses that are judged to be less original both by participants themselves, and by raters, than are newly generated ideas (Benedek et al, 2018; Silvia et al, 2017). It also could be valuable to contrast cognitive-neural responses to the perceptually ambiguous FIQ stimuli, which are all single continuously enclosed “object-like” stimuli with responses to other forms of perceptually ambiguous stimuli, such as the distributed fractal “pattern-like” images recently developed by Pepin et al (2022), the landscape-like photographs used by Diana et al (2021) in the context of pareidolias, or some of the multielement “scene-like” line-drawn stimuli of the PMT (Wallach & Kogan, 1965). For instance, in Experiment 6, we found that, unlike for any of the FIQ stimuli, some multielement PMT stimuli were often interpreted in human and social-emotional terms (e.g., three smaller circles arrayed around each of the sides of a larger triangle were often construed as three people sitting at a table at a meeting or eating lunch; four smaller circles arrayed at the top of a larger rectangle was often seen as people watching a movie, collaborating, or even as a jury).…”

“…In the case of more complex visuospatial arrangements of elements or textures, such as the clouds and wall-stains considered by Leonardo da Vinci, the proclivity for the human visual system to attempt to extract meaningful patterns may lead individuals to “see” human faces, animals, or other forms in perceptually ambiguous stimuli. This phenomenon, termed “pareidolia,” has recently been shown to be related to the fluency (although not originality) of divergent thinking as assessed by the alternative uses task (AUT; Diana et al, 2021; see also Gregory, 2000), and also to self-reported creativity and to semantic flexibility (Pepin et al, 2022) as assessed by the verbal divergent association task (Olson et al, 2021).…”

The phenomenology of pareidolia in healthy subjects and patients with left- or right-hemispheric stroke

“…We found that divergent thinking, in terms of fluency in the Alternative Uses Task (AUT) was predictive of fluency and originality, suggesting that pareidolia may represent a possible way to investigate divergent aspects of creative cognition. A recent study examining the perceptual aspect of creativity by means of a cloud-like fractal image paradigm confirmed these results [ 13 ]. More specifically, they found that pareidolia perceptions arise more rapidly and more often in highly creative individuals.…”