Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Pareidolia refers to the perception of recognizable forms in noisy or ambiguous stimuli. It has mostly been studied in thecontext of pathologies such as schizophrenia and dementia. However, pareidolic perception occurs in general populationwithout associated psychotic symptoms. This phenomenon is conceived as a compensatory perceptual mechanism thatenables the brain to deal with ambiguous information. It has been hypothesized that pareidolia would be related to theemergence of creative ideation. In this study, we investigated the effect of fractal dimension on pareidolic perception byasking participants to perceive as many recognizable forms as possible in a set of Fractional Brownian Motion imageswith varying fractal dimensions. In addition, we further investigated, using questionnaires, whether creativity, opennesspersonality trait and schizotypy are linked to pareidolic perception. Results show that creativity facilitates pareidolicperceptions and that this effect interacts significantly with the state of flow.