Have you ever noticed a face staring back at you from a cloud? Or a car that looks oddly angry? Or an electrical outlet that seems… surprised?
You’re not imagining things, and you’re not alone.
This phenomenon is called pareidolia—our tendency to see meaningful patterns, especially faces, in random or ambiguous things. Toast. Trees. Clouds. Rocks. Even your morning coffee if you look hard enough.
This might sound like amusing brain trivia. It’s not. Pareidolia reveals something critical for anyone designing training or learning experiences: The human brain hunts for faces and emotional cues before it processes information. That instinct doesn’t pause when someone opens your training module.
Marketers design for this reality every single day. Learning and Development often doesn’t—and learners pay the price.
Pareidolia Is a Feature, Not a Bug
Pareidolia is visual pattern recognition on autopilot. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes perfect sense. Seeing a face that isn’t really there costs you nothing. Missing a real face—a threat, an ally, a predator—could cost you everything. So your brain errs on the side of false positives every time.
Research confirms what evolution suggests: when people see face-like patterns such as the “Man in the Moon” or that piece of toast that looks like Jesus, the brain responds almost identically to how it processes actual human faces (Hadjikhani et al., 2009; Liu et al., 2014). In plain language, your brain treats possible faces as important signals even when they aren’t real. That bias doesn’t disappear when someone clicks “Start Training.”
Here’s what makes this matter for learning design: faces grab attention without conscious effort. Studies show that humans fixate on faces early in visual processing, often before they read text or notice other design elements (Birmingham et al., 2009). Emotional expressions can influence attention even when people aren’t trying to evaluate them (Vuilleumier & Schwartz, 2001; Johnson, 2005).
Attention isn’t a choice learners make. It’s a reflex—and that reflex is powerfully tuned to human faces.
Faces Don’t Just Grab Attention—They Guide It
But the story doesn’t end with attention capture. Faces do something even more powerful: they direct where that attention goes next.
Research on gaze cueing shows that people automatically follow the direction a face is looking, usually within a fraction of a second—typically 100 to 300 milliseconds (Friesen & Kingstone, 1998). See a face looking left? Your eyes will follow left, often before you’re consciously aware you’ve done it. This happens even when you know the face is just a photograph and even when you’re explicitly told the gaze direction is meaningless to your task (Driver et al., 1999).
This phenomenon, sometimes called joint attention, is deeply wired into social cognition. From infancy, humans learn to follow where others are looking because that’s where important things tend to be—food, threats, opportunities. That reflex doesn’t distinguish between a real person and a person in an image. Your brain follows the gaze automatically.
For learning designers, this is gold. You don’t just get attention—you get attention direction. A strategically placed face looking at your key diagram or critical headline doesn’t just make learners notice the face. It makes them notice what the face is looking at.
Marketing has been exploiting this for years. Studies of advertising show that faces looking at products increase both attention to and recall of those products compared to faces looking directly at the viewer (Hutton & Nolte, 2011). The same principle applies to any content competing for attention—including training.
Marketers Already Design for This (And Prove It Works)
Marketing doesn’t debate whether faces work. They test which faces work best, where they should look, and what expressions drive action—then they use those insights everywhere. Landing pages. Email headers. Video thumbnails. Ad campaigns. Billboards.
Advertising research consistently shows that faces in visuals attract attention faster, hold it longer, and improve both recall and emotional response (Sajjacholapunt & Ball, 2014). Eye-tracking studies back this up relentlessly. When a face appears in a visual scene, viewers fixate on it almost immediately, often ignoring surrounding elements until they’ve processed the face first (Birmingham et al., 2009).
But sophisticated marketers go further. They don’t just place faces—they place faces looking at what they want you to see. Product packaging. Call-to-action buttons. Value propositions. The face becomes an arrow, a spotlight, a visual guide that works below conscious awareness.
Marketers don’t fight how people see. They design with it, test it, refine it, and scale what works.
Meanwhile, in learning and development, faces often disappear entirely.
What L&D Does Instead
Many learning experiences are visually clean, well organized, and thoughtfully structured—all good things. But look closer at the actual visuals: abstract icons representing concepts, dense diagrams with arrows everywhere, bullet-heavy slides that prioritize information density, and stock photography carefully stripped of recognizable people.
The unspoken assumption seems to be this: “If the content is logically structured, learners will focus.” Pareidolia tells us that’s not how human perception works. Learners don’t arrive as neutral information processors. They arrive as pattern-seeking, meaning-making machines scanning for signals that tell them what matters. And the most powerful signal evolution gave them? Human faces—and where those faces are looking.
If you don’t provide faces strategically, learners will scan for meaning elsewhere. Sometimes they’ll find it. Often they won’t. Either way, you’ve left attention and emotional priming to chance rather than design.
The Real Warning: When Learners See Patterns You Never Intended
Pareidolia isn’t just about spotting faces in clouds. It’s a warning that people always try to make sense of what they see, even when the signal is weak, ambiguous, or misleading. In learning experiences, this automatic meaning-making can backfire in specific ways.
Consider what happens when facial cues conflict with content. You place a smiling stock photo on a slide about serious compliance violations. You use a relaxed, casual expression when teaching high-stakes safety procedures. You show a confident face when learners need to understand genuine risk. The learner’s System 1 brain—fast, automatic, emotional—processes the face first and forms an impression before System 2 thinking (slow, deliberate, analytical) even engages with your carefully written content (Stanovich, 2018).
The face always speaks first. If it’s saying the wrong thing, you’ve already lost the frame.
This connects to what cognitive scientists describe as default, low-effort processing. When learners aren’t actively engaged or when cognitive load is high, they rely on surface cues and quick interpretations instead of deep analysis (Chi & Wylie, 2014). A learner scanning a slide doesn’t consciously think, “This face looks unconcerned, so maybe this topic isn’t urgent.” But their attention, emotional state, and sense of importance all adjust based on that facial cue—usually without awareness.
The learner isn’t being careless. They’re being human. And if you don’t design faces carefully, you’re designing perception by accident.
What L&D Can Borrow from Marketing (Without Crossing Ethical Lines)
This isn’t about manipulation. It’s about realism—acknowledging how perception actually works and designing accordingly. Here’s what strategic face use looks like in learning design:
Use faces where attention truly matters, not as decoration. Place them at module openers where you need to break through distraction, at decision points where learners choose their path, or before critical information that requires full cognitive engagement. A face signals “pause here—something important is happening.” Don’t waste that signal on filler slides.
Direct attention with gaze, not just facial presence. If you place a face on a slide or in a video, make sure it’s looking at what matters—your headline, your diagram, your critical takeaway, your next-step button. Research proves that faces looking at content increase both attention to and recall of that content compared to faces looking at the camera (Hutton & Nolte, 2011). A face looking at your viewer creates connection but doesn’t direct focus. A face looking at your key concept does both. This is especially powerful for complex visuals where learners might not know where to look first. Let the face tell them.
Match facial expressions to the cognitive and emotional state you need. Teaching high-risk safety content? Show concern, alertness, seriousness. Introducing a creative brainstorming activity? Use openness, curiosity, energy. The expression sets the frame before a single word is read, so make it reinforce your learning goal rather than contradict it.
Be intentional about whose faces appear and how often. Representation matters for belonging and identification, but also for attention. Learners are more likely to engage when they see faces that reflect their own identity or experience (Johnson, 2005). This isn’t about tokenism—it’s about recognition. When a learner sees someone who looks like them taking a concept seriously, that face carries more weight than a generic stock photo ever could.
Design the visual hierarchy so faces don’t compete with content. A face draws the eye first, always—so place it where you want attention to land, then design the flow from that face toward your key message. If the face is in the wrong spot or looking in the wrong direction, learners will fixate there and miss what matters. Control the entry point and the sight line, and you control the learning path.
Or to put it more simply: Don’t ask learners to pay attention. Design so attention happens automatically, starting with the face and following where it looks.
Why This Connects to Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro
One of the core ideas in Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro is that learning doesn’t begin with content—it begins with perception, attention, and the automatic judgments System 1 makes before System 2 even shows up. Marketing understands this deeply. L&D often designs as if it doesn’t matter.
Pareidolia makes that gap impossible to ignore. If we design learning experiences that ignore how the brain automatically seeks faces and emotional cues, learners will still learn something—just not always what we intended. They’ll form impressions, make judgments, and prioritize based on whatever signals we accidentally provide. That’s the real risk: not that they won’t pay attention, but that they’ll pay attention to the wrong things.
Marketing psychology isn’t about tricks. It’s about respecting how humans actually perceive, process, and prioritize information. And faces—real, emotional, strategically placed faces looking at what matters—are one of the most powerful tools we have for guiding that process.
A Final Question (That’s Really a Challenge)
Look at your last training module, presentation, or learning experience right now. What faces did you include? What emotions did they show? And where were those faces looking?
If you’re not sure, your learners are answering those questions for you—whether you designed it or not.
Research Sources
Birmingham et al. (2009). Vision Research.
Chi & Wylie (2014). Educational Psychologist.
Driver et al. (1999). Visual Cognition.
Friesen & Kingstone (1998). Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
Hadjikhani et al. (2009). NeuroReport.
Hutton & Nolte (2011). Applied Cognitive Psychology.
Johnson (2005). Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
Liu et al. (2014). Cortex.
Sajjacholapunt & Ball (2014). Frontiers in Psychology.
Stanovich (2018). The Bias That Divides Us.
Vuilleumier & Schwartz (2001). Nature Neuroscience.
If this kind of thinking hits home, you’ll probably enjoy our book Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D. It’s packed with practical, real-world ideas to help you make your learning clearer, sharper, and a whole lot more effective.