Gender Differences In Face Pareidolia:Top-down Processing

Face perception in human being is both rapid and accurate,but it seems that a necessary cost of this efficiency is the over-perception error under some occasions.Face pareidolia refers to the compelling illusion of perceiving facial features on inanimate objects.previous studies have found that both the bottom-up information from visual stimuli and top-down information from high-level areas,contributed to the occurrence of face pareidolia.Recent studies suggest that gender difference as well as neurophysiological difference also influence its occurrence rates,women relative to men are more prone to detect faces from non-face stimuli,but other studies have come to different conclusions.What are the potential reasons for the sex difference on face pareidolia,if the difference does exist? Whether this difference exists in the bottom-up processing of visual information? For example,difference in the ability to encode face structure,or the difference of global–local perceptual style.Or the difference exists in the top-down processing stage and is affected by non-visual factors,for example,difference in processing potential social information.The aim of study 1 was to explore whether there are differences between the sexes when face detection is task-relevant and the task-irrelevant.Therefore,subjects were required to report the picture content,and rated how face-like the objects were.In study 2,We measured participants' performance of configural information,and explored whether the performance are related to face likeness rating.The aim of study 3 was to examine whether there is gender difference in perceptual style,participants were characterized as having either a global or a local perceptual style using the Navon task,then examine whether global preference index are related to face pareidolia.Results showed that in study 1,relative to male,female participants tend to rate higher the face likeness of a face-like pattern,though there is no difference in self reporting task.Only male achievement was positively correlated with/without task requirements,the women's performance on both tasks was unrelated.Results showed that in study 2,women have an advantage in face face configural processing,but the configuration informtion extract ability can not predict face pareidolia.Study 3 showed that men are more likely than women to treat the stimulus as a whole.However,Global preference in processing a Navon stimuli can predict females' face-likeness rating,but not males'.In summary,the results indicated that,when asked to detect faces.Women are more likely to see objects as faces.The gender difference of face pareidolia is not caused by the difference of visual factors,but by the difference of judgment criteria of "what is a face".There maybe other factors that cause the sex difference in face pareidolia,such as social information processing ability,which are left for future investigation.