The face in the socket.
Do you see a face in a wall socket, the front of a car or a cloud? Does that face have an expression, or even a gender?
Original study
- Wardle, S. G., Paranjape, S., Taubert, J., & Baker, C. I. (2022). Illusory faces are more likely to be perceived as male than female. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(5), e2117413119. Source
- Wardle, S. G., Ewing, L., Malcolm, G. L., Paranjape, S., & Baker, C. I. (2023). Children perceive illusory faces in objects as male more often than female. Cognition, 235, 105398. Source
- Taubert, J., Wardle, S. G., Flessert, M., Leopold, D. A., & Ungerleider, L. G. (2017). Face pareidolia in the rhesus monkey. Current Biology, 27(16), 2505–2509. Source
- Wardle, S. G., Taubert, J., Teichmann, L., & Baker, C. I. (2020). Rapid and dynamic processing of face pareidolia in the human brain. Nature Communications, 11, 4518. Source
- Liu, J., Li, J., Feng, L., Li, L., Tian, J., & Lee, K. (2014). Seeing Jesus in toast: Neural and behavioral correlates of face pareidolia. Cortex, 53, 60–77. Source
Our adaptation
An adaptation with drawings of the face pareidolia study of Wardle et al. (2022). Sixteen everyday objects drawn for this experiment are shown: in eight the parts are arranged like a face, the other eight are counterparts of the same kind without a face layout. Round 1 asks whether a face is seen in each object (object names are not shown); round 2 asks about expression and gender (male, female, neither) only for objects in which a face was seen.
Differences from the original study
- Drawings are used instead of photographs, and there are few objects.
- 'Neither' is always available in the gender question.
Measured variables
The columns of the open data file. List fields are expanded into numbered columns (for example rt_60, est_3); JSON columns contain only numbers and fixed stimulus names.
| Column | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
r | JSON | Objects: [[object no, saw a face 1/0, expression (−1 none, 0 happy, 1 surprised, 2 angry, 3 sad, 4 afraid, 5 neutral), gender (−1 none, 0 neither, 1 male, 2 female), round-1 time ms] × 16]. |
hit | integer | Faces seen in face-like objects. |
fa | integer | Faces seen in control objects. |
n_face | integer | Number of face-like objects (8). |
n_control | integer | Number of control objects (8). |
male | integer | Number of 'male' answers. |
female | integer | Number of 'female' answers. |
neither | integer | Number of 'neither' answers. |
gender_index | number | Gender balance: (male − female) / (male + female + neither); empty if no face was seen. |
Columns present in every file (14)
row_id | string | Row code. Regenerated at random in every release; it does not identify a person and cannot be matched across releases or experiments. |
experiment | string | Short name of the experiment (URL slug). |
experiment_version | integer | Version of the answer format. For experiments whose format changed, only the current format is published. |
date | YYYY-MM-DD | YYYY-Www | YYYY-MM | Day the answer was given (Istanbul time). If fewer than 5 answers share the same day, language and device, it is coarsened to the ISO week, and to the month if that is still too few. |
date_precision | day | week | month | Precision of the date column. |
lang | tr | en | (boş) | Interface language. Language recording started in the first week of October 2026; for earlier answers it is known only in experiments whose stimuli depend on the language, and empty otherwise. |
device | desktop | mobile | tablet | (boş) | Device class reported by the browser (class only; browser details are neither stored here nor published). |
source | site | embed | Where the answer came from: the balabs site or the experiment embedded on another site. The embedding site is not published. |
mode | free | daily | challenge | race | session | (boş) | Play mode in scored experiments: free play, daily round, challenge, race room, experiment session. Empty for unscored experiments and for older answers that did not store it. |
color_vision | normal | rg | by | contrast | (boş) | In color-based experiments, the color vision mode the participant chose: normal, red-green, blue-yellow or high contrast. Stimuli are generated along different axes per mode, so compare within a mode. Empty for other experiments. |
first_play | 1 | Every row is a participant’s first play of this experiment (always 1). Replays are stored only as leaderboard scores and are not part of the open data. |
seen_before | yes | no | unsure | (boş) | Participant’s own report of whether they had seen this experiment or its known answer before (in experiments that ask). |
duration_s | number | Time from the start of the experiment to submitting the answer, in seconds (measured in the browser, 0.1 s). |
play_score | number | Leaderboard score of the first play (scored experiments; defined on the method card). Empty for unscored experiments. |
Exclusion criteria
The server checks that each of the 16 objects was answered once and computes the counts itself.
- Only each participant's first answer to this experiment; replays are not included.
- Simulated rows, bots, banned and sample accounts are not included.
- Answers before 3 October 2026 are not included (the first day the open data notice was live).
Scoring
This experiment has no leaderboard score. The crowd result is the face rate for face-like and control objects and the gender balance.
Version notes
- October 2026
The interface language (lang) started being stored with each answer; for earlier answers it is known only in experiments whose stimuli depend on the language, and empty otherwise.