Pareidolia: Seeing Faces in Unusual Places

That conventional model is what Lee calls "bottom-up" processing, in which the brain's role is to passively take in information and make sense of it. If the brain sees faces everywhere, it's because the brain is responding to facelike stimuli — basically any cluster of spots and spaces that roughly look like two eyes, a nose and a mouth.But Kang and other researchers began to question the bottom-up processing model.