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This is Scientific Americans, 60-Second Science.

I'm Karen Hopkins.

It's probably happened to you.

You look at a parking meter or a pickle slice or the foam in your cup of

cappuccino and you think, Hey, that looks like a face.

It's a phenomenon called parodolia and it's something we humans tend to do.

Now, a new study suggests we also do something else.

We tend to see those illusory faces as having a gender.

And most often, we think they're male.

The findings appear in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Growing up, my sister Jenny and I had our own word for examples of face parodolia.

Beasups.

Susan Wardle, a cognitive neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health and Bethesda.

Her term is total nonsense, but Wardle must have felt some connection with beasups.

As a grownup, she set out to study them after a conversation she had with her colleague Jessica Talbert.

We were talking about face neurons in the brain, which respond preferentially to images of faces.

...