Research Project
Full description We tested whether individual variation in imagery vividness predicts susceptibility to face pareidolia, an illusion in which faces are falsely perceived in inanimate objects. Participants rated how face-like images of objects appeared and completed a standard measure of imagery vividness. Imagery vividness did not predict face-likeness ratings for canonical pareidolia images that strongly signal the presence of a face. However, imagery vividness positively predicted the tendency to report faces in non-face objects. These findings indicate that more vivid visualisers are more likely to impose face structure on ambiguous sensory input, consistent with stronger top-down influences on perception. Together, the results suggest that individual differences in imagination shape how strongly prior expectations bias perceptual decisions under uncertainty.