科学美国人60秒 为什么看哪都像脸?(1)

This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin.

这里是科学美国人——60秒科学系列，我是凯伦·霍普金。

It’s probably happened to you.

这很可能会发生在你身上。

You look at a parking meter or a pickle slice or the foam in your cup of cappuccino and you think, hey, that looks like a face.

你看着停车收费表，泡菜片，或者一杯卡布奇诺上的泡沫，你会想，嘿，这看起来像一张脸。

It’s a phenomenon called pareidolia and it’s something we humans tend to do.

这是一种被称为空想性错视的现象，也是我们人类往往会做的事情。

Now, a new study suggests we also do something else: we tend to see those illusory faces as having a gender and most often we think they’re male.

现在，一项新的研究表明，我们还会做一些其他的事情:我们倾向于把那些错觉面孔看作是有性别的，而且我们通常认为他们是男性。

The finding appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

这一发现发表在《美国科学院院报》上。

Growing up my sister Jenny and I had our own word for examples of face pareidolia: “beezups.”

从小到大，我姐姐珍妮和我都有自己的面部空想性错视的例子:“beezup”。

Susan Wardle, a cognitive neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda.

苏珊·沃德尔是贝塞斯达国立卫生研究院的认知神经学家。

Her term is total nonsense. But Wardle must have felt some connection with beezups.

她的术语完全是随便说说。 但沃德尔一定觉得自己和beezup有某种联系。

As a grownup, she set out to study them after a conversation she had with her colleague Jessica Taubert.

成年后，她在与同事杰西卡·陶伯特的一次交谈后开始研究这种关系。

We were talking about face neurons in the brain, which respond preferentially to images of faces.

我们讨论的是大脑中的面孔神经元，它们对面孔图像有优先反应。

But they also sometimes respond to pictures of round objects, such as apples or clocks.

但这些神经元有时也会对圆形物体的图片产生反应，比如苹果或时钟。

That reminded us of the experience of seeing faces in objects.

这让我们想起了在物体中看到人脸的经历。

And we thought it would be fun to find out whether the face regions of the brain respond to illusory faces in a similar way to real faces.

我们认为这将是一个有趣的发现，看看大脑中的面部区域是否对错觉面孔做出了与真实面孔相似的反应。

Indeed, in an earlier study, they found that the same brain regions activated by actual human faces were also triggered by faux faces in inanimate objects, like potatoes or teapots or washing machines.

事实上，在早期的一项研究中，他们发现被真实的人脸激活的大脑区域也会被无生命物体(如土豆、茶壶或洗衣机)的人造人脸激活。

But that made them wonder: what do we see in these illusory faces?

但这让他们想知道:我们在这些错觉面孔上看到了什么?

For example, do these faces appear to be of a particular age or gender?

例如，这些面孔是否具有特定的年龄或性别?

And do they have a specific emotional expression?

这些面孔有特定的情感表达吗?

So they set out to collect a cornuopia of images.

所以他们开始收集各种各样的图像。