Bridging Sensory Extraction and Decision Dynamics: Face Pareidolia Emergent from Bottom-Up and Top-Down Interactions

Face pareidolia emerges from a multi-stage recurrent process in EEG during RSVP, with later frontocentral activity forming a sharp sigmoidal decision profile along a 21-image morph continuum.

• Why it matters: It addresses whether illusory face perception is driven mainly by bottom-up sensory evidence or by top-down expectation feedback, a key unresolved debate.
• What they did: Participants viewed RSVP streams of object-to-face morphs generated along a 21-image continuum; time-resolved representational similarity and transformation-based representational connectivity analyses tracked feedforward versus feedback information flow.
• The result: Unambiguous face or object stimuli were resolved predominantly via feedforward flow, while ambiguous pareidolic images recruited prolonged top-down feedback; animacy priors biased decision sensitivity and predicted individual reaction times.

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