Flowers in the Attic: Lateralization of the detection of meaning in visual noise

Abstract

The brain is a slave to sense; we see and hear things that are not there and engage in ongoing correction of these illusory experiences, commonly termed pareidolia. The current study investigates whether the predisposition to see meaning in noise is lateralized to one hemisphere or the other and how this predisposition to visual false-alarms is related to personality. Stimuli consisted of images of faces or flowers embedded in pink (1/f) noise generated through a novel process and presented in a divided-field paradigm. Right-handed undergraduates participated in a forced-choice signal-detection task where they determined whether a face or flower signal was present in a single-interval trial...