Benjamin Balas
North Dakota State University, ND·Psychology
People sometimes see faces where none exist: in clouds, rocks or the front of a building. This illusion is called face pareidolia.
- Fields
Psychology
Neuroscience
- Topics
face pareidolia
face perception
visual perception
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Test whether children aged 5–12 become better at seeing faces in noise images that match natural image statistics than in images with unnatural statistics.
- Track how children's tendency to see pareidolic faces in random texture patterns changes with age.
- Examine how the developing ability to combine shapes and textures across an image into a whole supports face detection in cluttered, noisy images during childhood.
More about the research
These accidental sightings reveal what the visual system needs in a pattern to decide that something counts as a face. Vision is generally tuned to natural image statistics, the typical patterns of light and color found in real scenes. It is most sensitive to patterns that resemble them. Whether seeing patterns in noise is also tuned this way, and how that tuning develops in childhood, has not been well studied.
Why it matters
This basic research clarifies how children's growing experience with the visual world shapes their sense of what looks like a face and helps them find faces and objects in clutter. It could eventually inform broader understanding of how visual development supports social perception.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Andrew Lynn
University of Louisville, KY·Psychology
Track within-child development of contrast sensitivity and visual acuity in 6–12-year-olds for a central sinusoidal grating across detection and recognition tasks, using eye tracking and adaptive psychometric methods.
Khairi Reda
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Computer Science·Early-career
Extend image-computable models of human texture perception to chart and map images, predicting which data properties the early-to-mid visual cortex retains for the viewer.
Michael-Paul Schallmo
University of Minnesota, MN·Neuroscience
Test whether visual snow arises from excess spontaneous neural activity in visual brain areas by comparing adaptation-based perception tests in people with visual snow syndrome and normally sighted controls.
The school
North Dakota State University: 4 labs on PI Pages, $200M a year on research, 129 research doctorates a year.
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