Face Pareidolia

For years and years there has been a lot of speculation as to whether face processing is a special process. Some of the issues involved in face recognition are the same as for recognising any other possible object, other issues seem to be unique to just face recognition. The question remaining, is if the brain’s most efficient solution is to have special mechanisms for face recognition, or to simply extend the abilities of existing object recognition mechanisms.
Faces are surely special in a lot of phenomena, you can think of the inversion sensitivity and face pareidolia. Faces are extremely hard to recognise and put together when they’re upside down, this is the inversion sensitivity. Face pareidolia is the phenomena in which an otherwise
For face processing to be domain-specific, we need systems in the brain to be different. Farah (1996) had three criteria; systems should be functionally independent, physically distinct and the two systems should process information in a different way. In her research in 1996, she found evidence for the domain-specificity theory by testing on prosopagnosic patients. Prosopagnosia is defined as the inability to recognize individual faces following brain damage, but visual processing and intellectual functioning remains intact (Busigny, 2010). The subjects in Farah’s research had an impairment in face recognition, but not in object recognition. By testing the subjects, it was found that the system in which the patients had an impairment was not necessary for recognizing objects other than human faces. This is complementary to the ‘functionally independent systems’ criteria Farah talked about. In other research in which a prosopagnosic patient was tested, it was found that the patient had poor recognition of faces. This was linked to a perceptual impairment in face processing. Her object recognition was still intact and she still showed a normal ability to learn to recognize non facial objects. Along with this was still an impaired learning of facial exemplars used in the study (Riddoch, 2008). This case therefore also provides evidence for special perceptual processes for
One of them is the face inversion effect. Faces are extremely hard to recognise when they are upside down. The recognition of faces tends to be best when presented upright (Busigny, 2010). The inversion effect has way more effect on faces than it does on any other type of stimulus. Farah did some research on a prosopagnosic subject and found that the subject was better at matching inverted faces than upright faces (1995). This is the opposite of the usual face inversion effect. This finding implicates that there might be a domain-specific face processing system, because where there used to be an inversion effect in humans during face recognition, there is an opposite effect present in humans who are no longer able to recognise faces. Here you can see that even when there is a place in the brain that’s malfunctioning, the specialized systems still control the behaviour. To research this finding a bit more, we are going to have a look at the findings of Busigny and Rossion (2010). Busigny and Rossion found something else than Farah did in 2009. They found that there is an absence of the face inversion effect in prosopagnosia patients, by testing patients themselves, but also by summarizing other research articles that tested the same finding. The finding by Busigny and Rossion is also evidence for the domain-specificity effect, because we see that once there is no more face