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. 2024 Feb 29;10(5):e27414.
doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e27414. eCollection 2024 Mar 15.

The phenomenology of pareidolia in healthy subjects and patients with left- or right-hemispheric stroke

M Camenzind  1 , N Göbel  1   2 , A K Eberhard-Moscicka  1   3   4 , S E J Knobel  5 , H Hegi  5 , M Single  5 , B C Kaufmann  6 , R Schumacher  1   3 , T Nyffeler  6 , T Nef  3   5 , R M Müri  1   3   5
Affiliations

The phenomenology of pareidolia in healthy subjects and patients with left- or right-hemispheric stroke

M Camenzind et al. Heliyon. .

Abstract

Pareidolia are perceptions of recognizable images or meaningful patterns where none exist. In recent years, this phenomenon has been increasingly studied in healthy subjects and patients with neurological or psychiatric diseases. The current study examined pareidolia production in a group of 53 stroke patients and 82 neurologically healthy controls who performed a natural images task. We found a significant reduction of absolute pareidolia production in left- and right-hemispheric stroke patients, with right-hemispheric patients producing overall fewest pareidolic output. Responses were categorized into 28 distinct categories, with 'Animal', 'Human', 'Face', and 'Body parts' being the most common, accounting for 72% of all pareidolia. Regarding the percentages of the different categories of pareidolia, we found a significant reduction for the percentage of "Body parts" pareidolia in the left-hemispheric patient group as compared to the control group, while the percentage of this pareidolia type was not significantly reduced in right-hemispheric patients compared to healthy controls. These results support the hypothesis that pareidolia production may be influenced by local-global visual processing with the left hemisphere being involved in local and detailed analytical visual processing to a greater extent. As such, a lesion to the right hemisphere, that is believed to be critical for global visual processing, might explain the overall fewest pareidolic output produced by the right-hemispheric patients.

Keywords: Hemispheric stroke; Natural images; Pareidolia; Visual illusions; Visual processing.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Exemplary natural images used in the study.Left panel: An example set of natural images [12]. All experimental stimuli were unmodified landscapes that purposely did not include animals, objects or human beings. Right panel: An example of a participant's pareidolia drawing (in red). (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Number of pareidolia production per experimental group.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Percentages of pareidolia production accounting for 28 distinct categories.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Percentages for the category “Body parts” for the three experimental groups.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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