I have been photographing insects and spiders for some time and sometimes notice, especially on the abdomen of a spider, a seeming caricature of a human face. People tell me that it is in the human nature to search for a face. I would like to focus on the other side of the picture - why are there so many spiders (go to bugguide.net and type "face spider" into their search engine) with patterns that make us see a face? Most of them are so small that you don't see the face unless you can get a macro shot. Is it serendipity that among all the symmetric patterns they could have evolved a certain number of them will evolve with a face?
Dear Martha:
Pareidolia, as Joachim and Filippo have pointed out, is a fundamental aspect of human cognitive experience. Seeing faces in face-like forms is perhaps the most common form of pareidolia. Neuroscientific experiments using brain-scanning techniques shows us that their is a region in the brain called the fusiform gyrus, located at the juncture of the occipital and temporal lobes of the cortex, that is active when seeing faces or facial pareidolia. Here is a good article on this:
Hadjikhani, Nouchine; Kveraga, Kestutis; Naik, Paulami; Ahlfors, Seppo P. (2009). “Early (N170) activation of face-specific cortex by face-like objects”, en Neuroreport (Lippincott Williams & Wilkins), vol. 20, no. 4, 4 March 2009, pp. 403-407 (preliminary version available from National Institutes of Health Public Access: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2713437/, updated: 4 march 2010, access: 26 December 2015).
Around three million years ago a hominin classified as Australopithecus africanus picked up a pebble with depressions that suggest an australopithecine face and carried it several kilometers to a cave, in what is now Makapansgat, South Africa. This may be indirect evidence for facial pareidolia in an early hominin.
“The Makapansgat pebble,” in Natural History Museum, London, Trustees of the Natural History Museum, undated (http://piclib.nhm.ac.uk/results.asp?image=013061, access: 1 April 2015).
For more information, please see section 1 ("Evolutionary aesthetics and paleoneuroaesthetics") and section 5 ("Face recogition and evaluation") in the document Art in the embodied mind: a bibliography, posted a few months ago here at ResearchGate:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280949470_Art_in_the_embodied_mind_a_bibliography_updated_August_14_2015
Best regards,
David
Data Art in the embodied mind: a bibliography (updated August 14, 2015)
Joachim, thanks for all the sources. I had read about some wasps being able to recognize other wasps by their faces. (real faces). i tried to upvote your response by 2 but "they" wouldn't let me.
Filippo, thank you for your answer too. now I have to read all these sources!
What a wonderful way to connect with colleagues! I love it!
Joachim, I just read your first reference about the snake-eyes on the Attacus Atlas moth. Many of the saturniid moths have a pattern on their wingtips that A. atlas has evolved to an extreme limit. In this case, the evolutionary process is clearly illustrated.
Here the polyphemus and cecropia are from broods I raised a few years back. The cynthia is from my bug collection when I was in high school.
Dear Martha:
Pareidolia, as Joachim and Filippo have pointed out, is a fundamental aspect of human cognitive experience. Seeing faces in face-like forms is perhaps the most common form of pareidolia. Neuroscientific experiments using brain-scanning techniques shows us that their is a region in the brain called the fusiform gyrus, located at the juncture of the occipital and temporal lobes of the cortex, that is active when seeing faces or facial pareidolia. Here is a good article on this:
Hadjikhani, Nouchine; Kveraga, Kestutis; Naik, Paulami; Ahlfors, Seppo P. (2009). “Early (N170) activation of face-specific cortex by face-like objects”, en Neuroreport (Lippincott Williams & Wilkins), vol. 20, no. 4, 4 March 2009, pp. 403-407 (preliminary version available from National Institutes of Health Public Access: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2713437/, updated: 4 march 2010, access: 26 December 2015).
Around three million years ago a hominin classified as Australopithecus africanus picked up a pebble with depressions that suggest an australopithecine face and carried it several kilometers to a cave, in what is now Makapansgat, South Africa. This may be indirect evidence for facial pareidolia in an early hominin.
“The Makapansgat pebble,” in Natural History Museum, London, Trustees of the Natural History Museum, undated (http://piclib.nhm.ac.uk/results.asp?image=013061, access: 1 April 2015).
For more information, please see section 1 ("Evolutionary aesthetics and paleoneuroaesthetics") and section 5 ("Face recogition and evaluation") in the document Art in the embodied mind: a bibliography, posted a few months ago here at ResearchGate:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280949470_Art_in_the_embodied_mind_a_bibliography_updated_August_14_2015
Best regards,
David
Data Art in the embodied mind: a bibliography (updated August 14, 2015)
I thought that my question had lost the interest of RG-ers. The last response was a month ago! So thank you very much for your substantial answer!
You're welcome, Martha. The question just came to my attention this morning. Over the last two years I have been increasingly interested in pareidolia, using this perceptual phenomenon as a starting point for creating drawings. It is an important concept in the visual arts.
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