The impression that your cup of coffee is laughing at you, or that your laundry machine has googly eyes, is uncanny but common. It's even the subject of a Twitter account called Faces in Things with more than half a million followers. The account has featured winking chairs, moping suitcases and a smug lemon loaf. But this illusion, called face pareidolia, isn't uniquely human — monkeys can see it too.
Face pareidolia could be a side effect of humans' skill for abstraction, write psychologist Jessica Taubert of the National Institute of Mental Health and her coauthors. Or it could happen because we're exposed to so many cartoons and illustrations that anthropomorphize non-human objects. On the other hand, maybe the illusion isn't so special, and comes from traits that we share with other primates.
To find out whether monkeys experience face pareidolia, the scientists studied five rhesus macaques in the lab. ...
