A happy face advantage for pareidolic faces in children and adults

Pareidolic faces—illusory faces in objects—offer a unique context for studying biases in the development of facial processing because they are visually diverse (e.g., color, shape) while lacking key elements of real faces (e.g., race, species). In an online study, 7- and 8-year-old children (n = 32) and adults (n = 32) categorized happy and angry expressions in human and pareidolic face images. We found that children have a robust, adult-like happy face advantage for human and pareidolic faces, reflected in speed and accuracy. These results suggest that the happy face advantage is not unique to human faces, supporting the hypothesis that humans employ comparable face templates for processing pareidolic and human faces. Our findings add to a growing list of other processing similarities between human and pareidolic faces and suggest that children may likewise show these similarities.