Seeing faces in everyday objects is a common, but who knew we impose a gender on those images. And more often than not, it's a male face we see. People are more likely to see male faces when they see an image on the trunk of a tree or in burnt toast over breakfast, research from The University of Queensland has revealed. The illusion of seeing a facial structure in an everyday object is called face pareidolia, and Dr Jessica Taubert from UQ's School of Psychology says it tells us a lot about how our brains detect and recognise social cues. "The aim of our study was to understand whether examples of face pareidolia carry the kinds of social signals that faces normally transmit, such as expression and biological sex," Dr Taubert said. "Our results showed a striking bias in gender perception, with many more illusory faces perceived as male than female." Dr Taubert believes the results from the study which involved 3800 people show that we need more cues to label a face female. "We know when we see faces in objects, this illusion is processed by parts of the human brain that are dedicated to processing real faces, so in theory, face pareidolia 'fools the brain'," Dr Taubert said. "The participants could recognise the emotional expressions conveyed by these peculiar objects and attribute a specific age and gender to them. "Now we have evidence these illusory stimuli are being processed by the brain by areas involved in social perception and cognition, so we can use face pareidolia to identify those specific areas. "We can compare how our brains recognise emotion, age, and biological sex, to the performance of computers trained to recognise these cues. "Further we can use these interesting stimuli to test for abnormal patterns of behaviour." The UQ research team is keen for more examples of face pareidolia. If you spot a face - male or female - in an inanimate object email the photo to j.taubert@uq.edu.au.