The human visual system has evolved specialized neural mechanisms to rapidly detect faces. Its broad tuning for facial features is thought to underlie the illusory perception of faces in inanimate objects, a phenomenon called face pareidolia. Recent studies on face pareidolia suggest that the mechanisms underlying face processing, at least at the early stages of visual encoding, may treat objects that resemble faces as real faces; prioritizing their detection. In our study, we used breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) to examine whether the human visual system prioritizes the detection of objects that induce face pareidolia over stimuli matched for object content. Similar to previous b-CFS results using real face stimuli, we found that participants detected the objects with pareidolia faces faster than object-matched control stimuli. Given that face pareidolia has been more frequently reported amongst individuals prone to hallucinations, we also explored whether this rapid prioritization is intact in individuals with schizophrenia, and found evidence suggesting that it was. Our findings suggest that face pareidolia engages a broadly tuned mechanism that facilitates rapid face detection. This may involve the proposed fast subcortical pathway that operates outside of visual awareness.

中文翻译：

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视觉系统优先考虑诱发面部错视的物体

人类视觉系统已经进化出专门的神经机制来快速检测人脸。它对面部特征的广泛调整被认为是对无生命物体中面部的错觉感知的基础，这种现象称为面部幻觉. 最近对面部视错觉的研究表明，面部处理的潜在机制，至少在视觉编码的早期阶段，可能将与面部相似的物体视为真实的面部；优先检测他们。在我们的研究中，我们使用打破连续闪光抑制 (b-CFS) 来检查人类视觉系统是否优先检测诱发面部幻觉的物体，而不是与物体内容匹配的刺激。与之前使用真实面部刺激的 b-CFS 结果类似，我们发现参与者比对象匹配的控制刺激更快地检测到具有视错觉面部的对象。鉴于面部视错觉在容易出现幻觉的个体中更常见，我们还探讨了这种快速优先排序在精神分裂症患者中是否完好无损，并找到了证据表明它是完整的。我们的研究结果表明，面部视错觉参与了一种广泛调整的机制，有助于快速检测面部。这可能涉及提议的在视觉意识之外运行的快速皮层下通路。