Illusory Face Perception Analysis

This article will focus on illusory face perception which is finding faces that remind us of humans in things that have no face in them at all examples include faces of numerous religious icons in toasted food (Svoboda 2007) .There were two tests used to inspect the relationship between paranormal, religious beliefs and face perception. The key purpose of this essay will be to summarise and evaluate the article ‘ paranormal and religious believers are more prone to illusory face perception than sceptics and non believers’.
Some people claim to see faces and figures of religious characters or other people in weird places such as clouds and even food.The psychological phenomenon that causes individuals to see things in random images is known …show more content…
In the main experiment people had to try and find face like areas from 87 non face pictures and 98 artifact face pictures. If one was found they had to point with mouse to the location of the middle of the face and click left mouse button but if they didn’t find anything then they had to press the right button. The advantage of doing this was that it was completely random and unbiased and increased chances of a successful experiment. However in the article it says that all the paranormal believers were older than the sceptics which made it unbalanced. If the age ranges were somewhat similar it would have made more sense as younger people now have very mixed views and older people would have been raised differently and are more likely to believe in God and the supernatural. Pareidolia is a result of our brains constantly trying find patterns in the world. One pattern that humans are particularity well adapted to notice is that of a face. The researchers who were involved in the study said their findings are consistent with past research which has made it evident that belief in the paranormal tends to go quite well with a tendency to jump to conclusions based on insufficient and poor evidence. They also said that the results support the idea that those who are religious and those who believe in paranormal and supernatural have the habit of seeing human-like attributes, including mental states, in …show more content…
Another study which has been done in Finland suggested the same result. There are many flaws with the experiment that was conducted by Riekki and his team, such as the age differences between believers and non believers, which should have been considered. On the other hand, it is made quite clear that believers do see faces more often than those who do not believe. We even see it all in the media for example someone saw Jesus’ face on a piece of toast. We don’t really hear about non believers talking about them seeing figures in faceless