[Correspondence] Pareidolia in a Leonardo da Vinci painting

The perception of faces where none exist can be a window into how the brain makes sense of the world. This phenomenon, known as pareidolia, reveals the fundamental architecture of visual cognition: a dynamic interplay between bottom-up sensory processing and top-down interpretative prediction.1,2 Pareidolia can be a symptom in disorders that affect visual perception or attentional control, and in conditions in which the interpretation of ambiguous stimuli becomes biased towards socially meaningful patterns, such as faces.