Win NDP tickets with ST's pareidolia lucky draw
The Straits Times is running a promotional campaign for Singapore's National Day Parade, encouraging readers to find 'pareidolia' patterns in everyday objects. Participants can win tickets to the parade by submitting messages created with a custom font set.
Why it matters
This is a community engagement initiative designed to foster national pride and participation in a major cultural event.
Pareidolia is the psychological phenomenon of perceiving familiar shapes, faces, or patterns in response to ambiguous or random stimuli.
Listen Ever caught a face staring back from somewhere? It could be a dried leaf on the ground riddled with holes resembling a smile, or two convex traffic mirrors above a street light looking like the eyes and mouth of a cricket – sometimes we see unique things in the most random of places.
That’s pareidolia: the psychological phenomenon of perceiving familiar shapes, faces, or patterns in response to ambiguous or random stimuli.
It’s a completely normal cognitive function, stemming from how our brain is wired to quickly recognise patterns, trying to make sense of what presents itself in front of us by matching it with familiar templates from our memory.
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