How religion may control visual attention
Despite the abundance of evidence that human perception is penetrated by beliefs and expectations, scientific research so far has entirely neglected the possible impact of religious background on attention.
In a study published in November in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE, researchers at Leiden University and the University of Amsterdam, led by Lorenza Colzato, employed the “global-local paradigm” to measure whether Dutch Calvinists and atheists, brought up in the same country and culture and comparable in terms of race, intelligence, sex, and age, differ systematically with respect to the way they attend to and process the global and local features of complex visual stimuli.
The global-local task requires participants to react quickly and accurately by pressing a left or right key in response to global and local characteristics of hierarchically constructed visual stimuli (e.g., larger letters made of smaller letters). The results show that Calvinists attend less to global aspects of perceived events, which fits with the idea that people’s attentional processing style reflects possible biases rewarded by their religious belief system.
The study is the first of its kind to investigate the influence of religion on attentional processing. The researchers provide evidence that religious belief may systematically bias visual attention, even if culture is controlled for.
Given that real-life objects and events are commonly complex and hierarchically structured, so that their perceptual organization and semantic interpretation often hinges on the aspect or level an observer attends to, it seems possible that religious beliefs may indeed lead to different and sometimes discrepant and incompatible interpretations of the same incident—an issue of major political and societal implications.
Published
Colzato, L. S., van den Wildenberg, W., & Hommel, B. (2008). Losing the big picture: How religion may control visual attention. PLoS ONE
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