Sometimes we recognize faces where they have nothing to look for, such as the famous "man in the moon". The effect is called facial parking foil.
According to a new study, we mostly associate these imaginations with the male sex. There are several possible explanations for this.
Perhaps the male face is a kind of stencil for human faces. However, it is not yet known whether the tendency is innate or learned.
"Humanity is male." By that, the philosopher and feminist Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) meant that the man often stands for the general. Women, on the other hand, understand (s) as a deviation from the standard - they are "the opposite sex". A research group has found unexpected evidence of this view: in potatoes, cardboard boxes and coffee cups.
People can perceive faces in a wide variety of objects. Once you have recognized the dark eyes of a socket, you feel watched from all corners. The phenomenon is called facial pareidolia (see box "In brief"), and the reasons for its occurrence are well researched (see box "Why we see faces everywhere"). But the discovery by neuroscientist Susan Wardle and her team raises new questions. Grinning vegetable faces or confused washing machine visages are usually perceived as masculine. This was observed by experts from the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda when they had almost 4,000 test subjects evaluate 256 illusory faces according to emotion, age and gender.
The results are impressive in several ways. Although the researchers released the participants to assign a gender to the supposed face, the test subjects did just about half of the cases, with over 80 percent of these ratings being "male".
From the information provided by the test subjects, the scientists calculated a gender rating for each photo shown in the experiment. –1 meant a very feminine face and +1 a maximum masculine face. The highest score for a female face was -0.55, while the highest score for a male face was 0.93. Masculine faces were thus perceived more clearly as such than feminine ones.
Briefly explained: facial parking foil
The term describes the phenomenon of recognizing faces where there are none at all. In German-speaking countries, the term is often wrongly equated with the general pareidolia (from »para«, next to it, and »eídolon«, appearance). This occurs when something substantial is interpreted into a meaningless stimulus. In addition to visual ones, there are also acoustic pareidolia, such as when you »listen« to words or music into background noise.
This last finding is consistent with a Tübingen study from 2012. Regine Armann and Isabelle Bülthoff from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics showed their test participants images of human faces, which sometimes had more and sometimes less proportions of both sexes. So, such a "morph" could be 10, 20, 30 percent (and so on) female. On the 18 subjects, feminine faces appeared male much more often than vice versa. It was only when the researchers created "super-female" morphs that those depicted were reliably classified as female.
Where does the preference for the masculine come from, the men are just as much as women? To find out that, Wardle and her colleagues carried out a number of other attempts with the illusory faces. Did the objects shown affect themselves whether they were provided with the attribute "male" or "female"? For example, people may feel wristwatches or sports equipment more as a masculine. The team excluded the fact that such an association of content has influenced the perception through the following experiment: they replaced the images with appropriate words (such as "potato") and let the test subjects assign a gender. The tendency towards the male did not appear here.
Are they possibly visual properties such as the shape or color of the objects that make men or women think? For this, the experiments searched for every delusion of the sensory a photo that could not be recognized on which there were no human traits. Without such characteristics, a washing machine did not appear particularly male. The color also did not matter how revealed itself in the evaluation of black and white photos.
The distortion arises at the cognitive level
In search of explanations, the experts went one step further. Do "male" objects have more corners and edges? Or is it because of the positioning of the eyes and mouth? They checked all of these options with different algorithms - with no result. "We could not find a visual reason why the faces are perceived as male than female," Wardle says in a lecture on YouTube. "So it is our cognitive interpretation of the pictures that she shows us as male."
Psychologist April Bailey of New York University explains it this way: The distortion does not take place at the level of perception, but in how we think about the concept of gender. Faces are masculine, and a female face is defined in terms of masculine – which brings us back to Simone de Beauvoir. Man becomes woman by giving a face certain characteristics. "Think of Lego figures. There, the female versions often have additional properties such as lipstick, eyelashes and long hair," says Wardle.
The two brain researchers Marco Gandolfo from the Radboud University in Nijmegen and Paul Downing from Bangor University in Wales also write in a study that has not yet been independently tested that "the female face is processed as an extension of a male standard". In their experiment, the test subjects should discover the stimulus that falls out of line as quickly as possible, here specifically that one female among many male faces or a male among female face. With a female exception, this was achieved faster.
This fits with the findings of the influential attention researcher Anne Treisman (1935–2018) from the 1980s. According to their studies, people find it easier to recognize an ellipse between circles than the other way around. She explained this with the existence of a kind of template of a standard circle in the brain – ellipses represent a deviation from this; This makes it easier to recognize them. It's the same way, according to Gandolfo and Downing, with feminine faces that represent a deviation from the masculine.
Some scientists see a possible reason for this in the educational model of many Western societies. In the first few years, mothers take care of their offspring to a far greater extent than fathers. That's why children could get a more detailed idea of a female face. Therefore, people may automatically sort what does not correspond to this maternal type into the "man" category. In the brain, it goes something like this, Gandolfo says: ""Ah, the special characteristics that make up a woman are not there, so it must be a man." This can also be applied to illusory faces. Because these are usually very abstract and they lack typical female characteristics, the brain decides true to the motto "In case of doubt for the man".
A study by Jennifer Rennels from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, shows that the gender of the main affair has an impact on facial perception: compared to male faces, three to four -month -old infants observed female. However, only if the mother primarily did the care work. The father took a greater role in the life of the infant, lingering his look in the picture of a man.
Evolutionarily possibly advantageous
However, experiments have so far been missing, which have also been investigating a connection with facial parking foils. In addition, the effect can also be explained evolutionary: A team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem found in 2017 that threatening faces get aware of faster. So maybe we see male faces where there are no people at all because we associate them with danger. Evolutionary, it would make sense to frighten too much than to overlook a threat. Wardle warns: "You can argue evolutionarily, but I would be careful to overinterpret it."
It also considers social conditioning to be an important factor: languages are often andocentralized, made the male into a yardstick. This is reflected in German in the generic masculine. A team around April Bailey found in 2022 that the concept of "person" in a huge text body of English words is mainly linked to men. "An illusory face causes the term" person "in an object, which in turn activates the term" male "," says Wardle.
A 2015 experiment by Sapphira Thorne of the University of Surrey supports this interpretation: volunteers should assign gender to faces that were not clearly male or female. They saw the stimuli in only one half of their field of vision. Those on the right side were more likely to be male. The signals then arrive in the left hemisphere of the brain; this is where most of the language regions are located. The team suspects that these influence judgment and that male-dominated language makes it easier to interpret faces as male. But Wardle emphasizes: "We can only speculate about the reasons so far."
Why we see faces everywhere
When we see human face where there are actually none, the facial recognition system in the brain makes false alarm, explains Susan Wardle. There are regions that prefer to react to faces, such as the fusiform and the occipital facial area, and other areas such as the lateral occipital cortex in the back of the head that are receptive to the properties of objects. For example, if we see the eyes and mouth in a cup of coffee, the boundaries between facial and object recognition blur.
In a study of 2020, Wardle's team showed that illusory faces within the first milliseconds are more like human faces than objects. After 250 milliseconds, the brain assigns them to objects again. Our thought organ initially seems to have a strong slope to recognize faces, even if only a few indications of it. From an evolutionary point of view, it is better to discover faces too often than too rarely, explains Wardle. The amazing: facial parking foil occur in unborn babies. A team led by psychologist Nadja Reissland from Durham University in 2017 presented three light points through the maternal belly, which were arranged like a smiley. The children turned to these stimuli more often than when the points were arranged in the other way around.
