Structured imagination of novel creatures' faces

Two experiments examined the properties people include in drawings of faces of imaginary creatures from other planets. The majority projected the surface features and functions of human faces onto their creations and depicted those properties in ways that preserved the symmetry and other ordinary spatial relations among the components. When they did not include a human feature (e.g., eyes), they often generated a novel structure to support the same function (e.g., sensors for extracting visual information). When asked to produce child aliens, people projected humanlike variations in the relations among components, such as larger foreheads and smaller chins, even though they did not explicitly report that they had. The global pattern of results held when participants were asked to produce humanoid aliens as well as when they were asked to use their imaginations and avoid the influence of their knowledge of human faces. Projecting such properties onto extraterrestrials that could take virtually any form supports models that emphasize functional properties and the structural relations among the components of objects.