Durham University archaeologist Izzy Wisher and colleagues investigated whether pareidolia — a psychological phenomenon where people see meaningful forms in random patterns, such as seeing faces in clouds — may have influenced the artists who painted depictions of animals in the Las Monedas and La Pasiega caves, in Northern Spain. If so, then the majority of drawings would be expected to be depictions of animals that included features of the cave walls within them and take relatively simple forms. The authors found that pareidolia could be responsible for the production of some cave images, suggesting that the cave artists were experiencing the same psychological influences on perception when viewing the natural features of cave walls that humans still experience today.
Pareidolia — the psychological phenomenon of seeing meaningful forms in random patterns, such as perceiving faces in clouds — is a universal feature of our visual system.
It is likely a consequence of the evolution of our visual system adapting to allow partial or obscured profiles of potential predators to be rapidly identified through the conferral of meaning, and hence to minimize risk.
To achieve this, our visual system constructs a complete picture despite missing visual information, thus often causing us to ‘see’ things that are not there as it attempts to resolve ambiguous visual cues.
This process has been the subject of extensive psychological study, with existing debates regarding the particular cultural mechanisms that may cause pareidolia, e.g. do modern Western people see faces relatively frequently because our visual system has evolved to treat the visual stimuli of faces as ‘special’ or merely because we have visual expertise in face perception?
It certainly seems that pareidolia is informed by cultural experience, through the frequent perception of everyday objects or animals.
Thus, one’s visual familiarity with certain stimuli (particular animals, faces, or…
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