Faces everywhere

 

It’s amazing how faces seem to appear everywhere – whether this is a result of a face-specific innate mechanism, or just tons of practice with this particular class of stimulus. I recently discovered the wonderful Faces in Places blog, which is filled with examples of faces appearing in the most unlikely places. The picture above is perhaps a poor example of the human readiness to perceive anything as a face, since this particular item was likely designed with faces in mind.

 

 

 

 

That is a less plausible explanation for why these motorcycle gas tanks look like faces – they weren’t designed to be viewed from this angle.

We seem to be inclined to interpret almost any object with three enclosed dots as a face. This is quite different from other objects with which we have a lot of experience: you probably spend considerable amounts of time looking at your hands in order to guide your actions, but if you’re anything like me you  don’t see hands everywhere.