Thinking of God moves attention

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.09.029

Neuropsychologia

Volume 48, Issue 2, January 2010, Pages 627-630

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.09.029 Get rights and content

Abstract

The concepts of God and Devil are well known across many cultures and religions, and often involve spatial metaphors, but it is not well known if our mental representations of these concepts affect visual cognition. To examine if exposure to divine concepts produces shifts of attention, participants completed a target detection task in which they were first presented with God- and Devil-related words. We found faster RTs when targets appeared at compatible locations with the concepts of God (up/right locations) or Devil (down/left locations), and also found that these results do not vary by participants’ religiosity. These results indicate that metaphors associated with the divine have strong spatial components that can produce shifts of attention, and add to the growing evidence for an extremely robust connection between internal spatial representations and where attention is allocated in the external environment.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were 28 University of Toronto undergraduate students (10 male, 18 female) who received a course credit in exchange for their participation. Sixty percent reported being Christian, 13% Muslim, 8% Buddhist, and 19% did not ascribe to any set of religious beliefs.

Procedure

Participants completed two counterbalanced simple detection tasks, a horizontal task and a vertical task. To ensure that participants were focused at the center of the display on the monitor, a closed-circuit TV system was

Results

A preliminary analysis showed that the words “Almighty” and “Lucifer” did not influence RTs, so the following analyses were conducted using the words God, Lord, Devil, and Satan (mean RTs are shown in Table 1). As pilot testing determined that the attentional effect was present during the range of SOAs, SOA was not included as a factor in the analyses. To determine the effect of the divine words on attention, cueing effects were calculated as a difference in target detection times between

Discussion

As predicted, participants were faster to detect targets when they appeared in locations that were spatially compatible with cues related to the concept of the divine. Specifically, simply determining whether God-related words were religious in nature generated shifts of attention to upward and rightward regions of the visual field. Similarly, Devil-related words invoked attentional shifts to downward and leftward regions of the visual field. Thus, activating internal representations of the

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada awarded to J. Pratt.

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NoteThinking of God moves attention

Abstract

Section snippets

Participants

Procedure

Results

Discussion

Acknowledgements

Cognition

Neuropsychologia

Authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, quest, and prejudice

The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion

Perceptual symbol systems

Behavioral and Brain Sciences

The encyclopedia of Tibetan symbols and beliefs

Top-down versus bottom-up control of attention in the prefrontal and posterior parietal cortices

Science

A contribution to the problem of the pre-eminence of the right, based upon Arabic evidence. (Originally published 1964)

Space and attention in parietal cortex

Annual Review of Neuroscience

Voluntary orienting is dissociated from target detection in human posterior parietal cortex

Nature Neuroscience

Perceiving numbers causes spatial shifts of attention

Nature Neuroscience

Note
Thinking of God moves attention