Losing the big picture: 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. Here we show that Dutch Calvinists and atheists, brought up in the same country and culture a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2008-11, Vol.3 (11), p.e3679-e3679
Main Authors: Colzato, Lorenza S, van den Wildenberg, Wery P M, Hommel, Bernhard
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Abundance
Attention
Attentional bias
Bias
Brain research
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive psychology
Female
Humans
Influence
Intelligence
Intelligence Tests
Male
Mental Health/Psychology
Psychological Theory
Public Health and Epidemiology
Public Health and Epidemiology/Social and Behavioral Determinants of Health
Religion
Religious aspects
Scientific research
Studies
Trends
Variance analysis
Visual Perception
Visual stimuli
Young Adult
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Summary: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. Here we show that Dutch Calvinists and atheists, brought up in the same country and culture and controlled for race, intelligence, sex, and age, differ with respect to the way they attend to and process the global and local features of complex visual stimuli: 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.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0003679