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你觉得，这看起来像脸吗？ 你可能也遇到过，在盯着停车收费器、黄瓜切片或是卡布奇诺上的奶泡时，你会突然想到，哎，有张人脸呢！这一现象被称为空想性错视（pareidolia），是我们人类会干出的事儿。
图片来源：Trevor Hurlbut/Flickr, CC BY 2.0 。 如今，一项新研究表明，我们还会干另一件事：我们倾向于认为这些虚幻的人脸有性别，通常情况下都是男性。该发现结果发表在《美国科学院院刊》（PNAS）上。 “我和一起长大的姐妹珍妮专门用一个词来称呼那些空想性错视看到的脸——beezup。” 美国国立卫生院（NIH）的认知神经科学家苏珊·沃德尔（Susan Wardle）说。beezup 一词本身没有意义，但她一定是感受到了这个现象，如今长大成人的沃德尔某次与同事杰西卡·陶伯特（Jessics Taubert）交谈之后，开始着手研究这个现象。 “我们当时在讨论大脑中优先响应人脸图片的面孔神经元。这些神经元有时也会对圆形物体图片作出反应，例如苹果或者时钟。这让我们想到在物体中看到人脸的经历。我们想知道，这些面孔神经元对错视面孔和对真人面孔的响应机制是否一致。” 在此前的一项研究中，她们发现真实人脸和无生命物体（例如土豆、茶壶或者洗衣机）上的假脸会激活相同的脑区。但她们也很好奇：在这些假脸上我们到底看到了什么？ “例如，这些脸是否具有特定的年龄或者性别？是否传递着一种特别的情绪？” 于是，团队着手收集各种图片。 “一开始，我们从在网上搜寻人脸错视的图例，现在，人们会把自己看到的错视图发送给我们，我们自己在外面看到类似人脸的物体时也会拍下来。” 他们让 3800 名受试者看了 250 张这样的照片。 “我们发现，人们非常容易赋予看到的虚幻人脸一些特征，比如，把它看作一个惊恐的小男孩，或者脾气暴躁的老妇人。” 但最让人意外的是……[查看全文] Does This Look like a Face to You? Science—and experience—show that we most definitely see faces in inanimate objects. But new research finds that, more often than not, we perceive those illusory faces as male. Karen Hopkin: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin. Hopkin: It’s probably happened to you. You look at a parking meter or a pickle slice or the foam in your cup of cappuccino and you think, hey, that looks like a face. It’s a phenomenon called pareidolia and it’s something we humans tend to do. Now, a new study suggests we also do something else: we tend to see those illusory faces as having a gender….and most often we think they’re male. The finding appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Susan G. Wardle et al., Illusory faces are more likely to be perceived as male than female.] Susan Wardle: Growing up my sister Jenny and I had our own word for examples of face pareidolia: “beezups.” Hopkin: Susan Wardle, a cognitive neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. Her term is total nonsense. But Wardle must have felt some connection with beezups. As a grownup, she set out to study them after a conversation she had with her colleague Jessica Taubert. Wardle: We were talking about face neurons in the brain, which respond preferentially to images of faces. But they also sometimes respond to pictures of round objects, such as apples or clocks. That reminded us of the experience of seeing faces in objects. And we thought it would be fun to find out whether the face regions of the brain respond to illusory faces in a similar way to real faces. Hopkin: Indeed, in an earlier study, they found that the same brain regions activated by actual human faces were also triggered by faux faces in inanimate objects, like potatoes or teapots or washing machines. But that made them wonder: what do we see in these illusory faces? Wardle: For example, do these faces appear to be of a particular age or gender? And do they have a specific emotional expression? Hopkin: So they set out to collect a variety of images. Wardle: We started by finding examples of face pareidolia on the internet. Now, people send us their own examples. And we also take photos of illusory faces that we see out in the world. Hopkin: They showed 250 of these photos to some thirty-eight hundred volunteers. Wardle: And we found that people readily attribute these features to illusory faces. For example, a given illusory face might look like a fearful young boy or a grumpy older woman. Hopkin: But most striking of all…[full transcript] “ Wardle, S.G., Paranjape, S., Taubert, J. and Baker, C.I., 2022. Illusory faces are more likely to be perceived as male than female. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(5). |
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