News Finding: It's just the way our brains work.
Paper Finding: One possibility is that new stimuli showed some variability in terms of conceptual processing fluency, and this fluency was sometimes attributed to repetition (oldness), leading to a selective response bias for a subset of conceptually meaningful stimuli.
News Context: In the contours and colors of the lunar surface, people can find meaningful figures for the same reason that we "see" the face of Elvis in a potato chip or Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich. It's just the way our brains work. "About half end up being meaningful, on average," Voss said.
Paper Context: Importantly, the brain activations related to the bias were highly similar to those related to conceptual fluency due to stimulus repetition (i.e., reduced activity in left inferior and superior frontal gyrus). One possibility is that new stimuli showed some variability in terms of conceptual processing fluency, and this fluency was sometimes attributed to repetition (oldness), leading to a selective response bias for a subset of conceptually meaningful stimuli. This interpretation will require additional direct evidence, but our results nonetheless suggest that the pareidolia experience might also provide a useful model for investigating mechanisms of fluency-based biases in recognition memory judgments.