パレイドリア現象における瞳孔径応答

抄録

Most people have experienced phenomenon where they perceive faces in the various non-face objects. This phenomenon is called “face pareidolia”. In the present study, we investigated face pareidolia using pupillary response. The pupillary response was suggested to be influenced by high-level cognition. Therefore, we predicted that change of pupil diameter might be induced by face pareidolia. In our study, we measured that pupil diameter when stimuli were perceived as faces. The stimuli consisted of five circles including a big circle and four small circles. The subjects performed two tasks (face-like and symmetry) to the same stimuli in the block design. As results, pupil dilation in face-like condition showed differences between the face-like task and symmetry task. However, pupil dilation in symmetry condition showed no differences between tasks. These results suggest that this pupillary effect is specific for the face-like processing by top-down process and not specific for the symmetry processing.