科学美国人60秒 这看起来像你的脸吗？（在线收听）

Does This Look like a Face to You?

Karen Hopkin: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin.

Hopkin: It’s probably happened to you. You look at a parking meter or a pickle slice or the foam in your cup of cappuccino and you think, hey, that looks like a face. It’s a phenomenon called pareidolia and it’s something we humans tend to do.

凯伦霍普金：这是《科学美国人》的 60 秒科学。 我是凯伦霍普金。

霍普金：这可能发生在你身上。 你看着停车计时器或泡菜片或卡布奇诺杯中的泡沫，你会想，嘿，那看起来像一张脸。 这是一种称为幻觉的现象，是我们人类倾向于做的事情。

Now, a new study suggests we also do something else: we tend to see those illusory faces as having a gender….and most often we think they’re male. The finding appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Susan G. Wardle et al., Illusory faces are more likely to be perceived as male than female.]

Susan Wardle: Growing up my sister Jenny and I had our own word for examples of face pareidolia: “beezups.”

现在，一项新的研究表明我们还可以做其他事情：我们倾向于将那些虚幻的面孔视为具有性别……而且我们通常认为他们是男性。 这一发现发表在《美国国家科学院院刊》上。 [Susan G. Wardle 等人，虚幻的面孔更容易被视为男性而不是女性。]

苏珊·沃德尔：在我姐姐珍妮和我的成长过程中，我对面部幻觉的例子有自己的说法：“beezups”。

Hopkin: Susan Wardle, a cognitive neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. Her term is total nonsense. But Wardle must have felt some connection with beezups. As a grownup, she set out to study them after a conversation she had with her colleague Jessica Taubert.

霍普金：Susan Wardle，贝塞斯达国立卫生研究院的认知神经科学家。 她的说法完全是胡说八道。 但 Wardle 一定觉得与 beezups 有某种联系。 作为一个成年人，她在与她的同事杰西卡陶伯特交谈后开始研究它们。

Wardle: We were talking about face neurons in the brain, which respond preferentially to images of faces. But they also sometimes respond to pictures of round objects, such as apples or clocks. That reminded us of the experience of seeing faces in objects. And we thought it would be fun to find out whether the face regions of the brain respond to illusory faces in a similar way to real faces.

Wardle：我们谈论的是大脑中的面部神经元，它们优先响应面部图像。 但他们有时也会对圆形物体的图片做出反应，例如苹果或时钟。 这让我们想起了在物体中看到面孔的经历。 我们认为找出大脑的面部区域是否以与真实面孔相似的方式对虚幻面孔做出反应会很有趣。

Hopkin: Indeed, in an earlier study, they found that the same brain regions activated by actual human faces were also triggered by faux faces in inanimate objects, like potatoes or teapots or washing machines. But that made them wonder: what do we see in these illusory faces?

Wardle: For example, do these faces appear to be of a particular age or gender? And do they have a specific emotional expression?

霍普金：事实上，在早期的一项研究中，他们发现被真实人脸激活的相同大脑区域也被无生命物体中的假脸触发，比如土豆、茶壶或洗衣机。 但这让他们想知道：我们在这些虚幻的面孔中看到了什么？

Wardle：例如，这些面孔看起来是否具有特定的年龄或性别？ 他们有特定的情感表达吗？

Hopkin: So they set out to collect a variety of images.

Wardle: We started by finding examples of face pareidolia on the internet. Now, people send us their own examples. And we also take photos of illusory faces that we see out in the world.

Hopkin: They showed 250 of these photos to some thirty-eight hundred volunteers.

霍普金：所以他们开始收集各种图像。

Wardle：我们首先在互联网上寻找面部幻觉的例子。 现在，人们向我们发送他们自己的示例。 我们还拍摄我们在世界上看到的虚幻面孔的照片。

霍普金：他们向大约 3800 名志愿者展示了其中的 250 张照片。

Wardle: And we found that people readily attribute these features to illusory faces. For example, a given illusory face might look like a fearful young boy or a grumpy older woman.

Do you see faces here? Credit: Thorsten Gast / EyeEm/Getty Images

Hopkin: But most striking of all…

Wardle: …there was a strong bias for people to perceive illusory faces as male rather than female.

Wardle：我们发现人们很容易将这些特征归因于虚幻的面孔。 例如，给定的虚幻面孔可能看起来像一个害怕的小男孩或一个脾气暴躁的老妇人。

你看到这里的脸了吗？ 图片来源：Thorsten Gast / EyeEm/Getty Images

霍普金：但最引人注目的是……

Wardle：……人们强烈倾向于将虚幻的面孔视为男性而不是女性。

Hopkin: About four times as often, the researchers found.

Wardle: And this was the case for both female and male participants.

Hopkin: So it wasn’t just that men saw Mr. Potato Head everywhere they looked. It also wasn’t tied to the type of object in question…like a hammer versus a handbag.

Wardle: And the male bias persists when the faces are shown in black and white, so it’s not due to gender associations with color, either.

霍普金：研究人员发现，频率大约是原来的四倍。

Wardle：女性和男性参与者都是这种情况。

霍普金：所以不仅仅是男人们在他们所看到的任何地方都能看到马铃薯头先生。 它也与所讨论的物体类型无关……就像锤子和手提包。

Wardle：当面孔以黑白显示时，男性偏见仍然存在，所以这也不是由于性别与颜色的关联。

Hopkin: Obviously none of these fake faces has a biological sex.

Wardle: Which means there is no reason for us to perceive them to have a particular gender. The fact that we do shows the illusory faces also engage our social perception system.

Hopkin: And the reason we default to seeing males is that our brains need more information before we see a face as female. Think of a smiley face emoji.

霍普金：显然这些假脸都没有生理性别。

Wardle：这意味着我们没有理由认为他们有特定的性别。 我们这样做的事实表明，虚幻的面孔也参与了我们的社会感知系统。

霍普金：我们默认看到男性的原因是我们的大脑需要更多信息才能看到女性的脸。 想想笑脸表情符号。

Wardle: Most people would probably say that it looks more male than female. The addition of other details, such as eyelashes and hair, is used to make emojis look more female. The same is true of Lego characters.

Hopkin: The fact that we’re so quick to see faces in couch cushions and tree trunks and slices of bread…gender assignments aside…is maybe not all that surprising. The same thing happens to monkeys…creatures who are also hard-wired for making social connections.

Wardle：大多数人可能会说它看起来更像男性而不是女性。 添加其他细节，例如睫毛和头发，用于使表情符号看起来更女性化。 乐高角色也是如此。

霍普金：事实上，我们很快就能在沙发垫、树干和面包片中看到人脸……抛开性别分配……也许并不那么令人惊讶。 同样的事情也会发生在猴子身上……这些生物也天生就可以建立社会联系。

Wardle: And it suggests that we see illusory faces because, like other social primates, our brains are so tuned into faces, we don’t want to miss a single face in the environment, even if that means occasionally making a mistake.

沃德尔：这表明我们看到了虚幻的面孔，因为就像其他社会灵长类动物一样，我们的大脑如此适应面孔，我们不想错过环境中的任何一张面孔，即使这意味着偶尔会犯错。

Hopkin: Seems the potential benefit of gaining a friend is worth more than the potential cost of losing face.

霍普金：似乎获得朋友的潜在好处比丢脸的潜在成本更有价值。

For Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, I’m Karen Hopkin.

这里是《科学美国人》的 60 秒科学，我是凯伦·霍普金。