We do tend to "see" patterns that associate to built-in or learned abstractions, such as faces (or elephants, etc.) in clouds. This is especially the case when

We do tend to "see" patterns that associate to built-in or learned abstractions, such as faces (or elephants, etc.) in clouds. This is especially the case when social reinforcement is a factor, like when someone points skyward and asks, "don't you see a face in that cloud?" and soon everyone standing nearby agrees it sure looks like a face. That computers are "fooled" may simply reflect their human programming, though not being fooled could well be a very hard problem to solve. It's amusing the way face-detection in my spiffy digital camera (an Olympus EM1) will find faces in all kinds of inanimate objects. The feature can be useful for photographing real people, but in other situations face-detection is just a distraction and I keep it turned off. Though now I may have to aim the camera at a few clouds...