Pattern Perception

6 pages on this site touch on this topic.

• Apophenia — The tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unconnected things — coined clinically, now mostly used for a mild, everyday tendency.
• Apophenia and pareidolia — Two related terms for perceiving patterns that aren't really there — one from a clinical study of psychosis, the other a normal visual effect.
• Clustering illusion — The tendency to see meaningful streaks or clusters in sequences that are actually random, because random sequences cluster more than intuition expects.
• Coincidence and wellbeing: a spectrum, not a switch — Perceiving meaningful connections in random events varies continuously across everyone, and relates only loosely to psychosis-proneness.
• Pareidolia — Seeing a specific, familiar pattern — most often a face — in something that doesn't actually contain one, such as a face in a cloud or a piece of toast.
• Pattern perception and the clustering illusion — Why noticing patterns in random-looking data is usually adaptive, not irrational — and why a famous 'debunking' of one such pattern was later revised.