Abstract
The perception of a meaningful facial pattern on a nebulous stimulus-face pareidolia-is a typical human experience. Neuroimaging and electrophysiological studies have generally shown similarities in the spatio-temporal responses to typical faces and objects eliciting face pareidolia, that is, facelike objects. However, the extent to which facelike objects engage the same neural basis as human faces remains unclear. To address this issue, we used direct measures of brain activity from intracerebral electrodes implanted in the ventral occipito-temporal cortex (VOTC) of a large group of patients (n = 44). Face selectivity was determined by contrasting a large set of naturalistic face or facelike object images with non-face object categories. High signal-to-noise ratio face-selective and facelike object-selective responses were objectively identified and quantified with frequency tagging and compared in space and time throughout the VOTC. Selective activity to facelike objects was found in all key regions of the human cortical face network, extending to the previously unexplored anterior temporal lobe (ATL). Although category-selective activity was markedly reduced for facelike objects compared with human faces, consistent with previous findings, 89% of facelike object-selective contacts spatially overlapped with human face-selective contacts, while the remaining spatially scattered contacts recorded negligible responses. Furthermore, the amplitude of the two face-selective neural signals showed high correlations across regions, recording contacts and time courses as well as concurrent early onset, challenging the view that facelike objects are interpreted as faces through feedback from higher order brain regions. Together, our findings demonstrate that the pareidolic perception of face in facelike objects engages the same ventro-temporal neural circuitry, with the same temporal dynamics, as human faces.