What’s in a face (made of foods)? Comparing children’s and monkey’s perception of faces in face-like images of food

Assessing the perception of face pareidolia in children (Homo sapiens), rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta), and capuchin monkeys (Sapajus apella).

“…Whereas monkeys may attend to illusory faces similarly to how they attend to real faces (an implicit/passive viewing behavior), as shown in Taubert et al (2017), they fail to make an explicit/active choice that these images are face-like in the same way they do with images of real faces. This is also consistent with Beran et al (2017) in which monkeys did not categorize Arcimboldo images as faces in the same way children did. Overall, the previous literature and the current results indicate that only children are actively recognizing and explicitly declaring through their responses that they see these patterns as something that is face-like.…”

“…However, it remains unclear whether these responses represent explicit recognition of a pattern as being “face-like” or an implicit attraction to this particular configuration (without the adult-like recognition of it being similar to that of a real face). In another study, 3- to 5-year-old children categorized Arcimboldo images as “faces” significantly more often than they did scattered images with no face-like configuration (Beran et al, 2017). Therefore, by the age of 3 years, children’s holistic processing of faces should be sophisticated enough to elicit explicit recognition of face-like configurations and face pareidolia.…”

“…Recent experiments have also shown similarities in the processing of social information from real and illusory faces (Alais et al, 2021; Palmer & Clifford, 2020; Wardle et al, 2022). A few experiments have studied whether this illusion is present in young children or infants, using looking-time measures and categorization tasks (Beran et al, 2017; Kato & Mugitani, 2015; Kobayashi et al, 2012).…”

“…What makes this task different from Beran et al (2017) is that in this task participants are trained to look for faces because a face is present on every trial. Beran et al (2017) had participants classify single stimuli as being face (or face-like) versus not a face, but the present task should elicit a search on each trial for the most face-like stimulus. In principle, this training could lead to monkeys searching for face-like stimuli on each trial, giving us a complementary assessment of whether they experience pareidolia.…”

Exploring the Jastrow Illusion in Humans (Homo sapiens), Rhesus Monkeys (Macaca mulatta), and Capuchin Monkeys (Sapajus apella)

“…Monkeys already were well trained in how to engage the computerized apparatus. They had previously completed studies that examined many cognitive capacities, including past studies focused on visual illusions (e.g., Agrillo, Gori, & Beran, 2015;Agrillo et al 2014aAgrillo et al , 2014bBeran, 2006;Beran, Perdue, Kelly, & Parrish, 2017;Parrish et al, 2015Parrish et al, , 2016.…”