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Offlineunsui888
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Cognitive Styles, Belief Systems, & Pareidolia
    #21925103 - 07/10/15 03:50 PM (8 years, 6 months ago)

So I am trying to design an experiment or study to look at how beliefs affect perception. I am interested in believers in the paranormal and religious people, and figured that an underlying common cognitive style of these belief systems might be playing a role in whether one perceives meaningful stimuli in otherwise ambiguous "noise".

A couple researchers have looked at this idea already and have found that:

1) Believers in paranormal see more meaningful patterns in random/noisy stimuli, particularly when the stimuli are presented in the left-visual field (when right hemisphere is dominating visual processing)

2) Believers in paranormal (particularly people who hold esoteric beliefs and are superstitious) are more field-dependent --> field-dependence is a more intuitive/holistic perceptual/cognitive style in which one sees the forest before the trees

3) Believers in paranormal and religious people saw more faces in pictures in which there were no face-like areas (i.e. more prone to illusory face detection)

I was thinking that perhaps I should measure field-dependence (and a related construct called "global-precedence effect") and belief in esotericism, paranormal, and God, and see whether belief and field-dependence predict whether one perceives meaningfulness in randomness. But instead of seeing how this applies to visual perception, maybe I could see if previous findings generalize from the visual to the auditory modality of perception.

What do you guys think?


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"a note for asses: what is very convincing, is not necessarily true - it is merely convincing"

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OfflinePsiloPsychIn
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Re: Cognitive Styles, Belief Systems, & Pareidolia [Re: unsui888]
    #21925140 - 07/10/15 03:58 PM (8 years, 6 months ago)

Many of the variables you describe in your list are individual difference / personality variables. Thus, they cannot be ethically manipulated. Perhaps rather than an experiment you intend to conduct a survey to examine correlations between those personality variables and perception behavior...

You have some interesting ideas to begin with.


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Offlineunsui888
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Re: Cognitive Styles, Belief Systems, & Pareidolia [Re: PsiloPsychIn]
    #21925592 - 07/10/15 06:05 PM (8 years, 6 months ago)

Yeah, I was thinking that too. The only idea that I have that would work for an experiment is this:

-Prime some of the subjects with religious concepts (experimental group receives prime, and then have a control group that does not)
-Measure field-dependency via Embedded Figures Test
-Have subjects complete a recognition task in which they are shown ambiguous stimuli and asked if they recognize anything meaningful, and then have them rate their confidence in their answer

Otherwise, I will probably look at whether field-dependency mediates the relationship between religiosity/paranormal belief and visual or auditory pareidolia... :pipesmoke:


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"a note for asses: what is very convincing, is not necessarily true - it is merely convincing"

primus------------------------------------------------------------------------
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InvisibleOrgoneConclusion
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Re: Cognitive Styles, Belief Systems, & Pareidolia [Re: unsui888]
    #21926251 - 07/10/15 09:23 PM (8 years, 6 months ago)

Pareidolia = seeing young children wherever you look.

:icouldjusteatyou:


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OfflinePsiloPsychIn
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Re: Cognitive Styles, Belief Systems, & Pareidolia [Re: unsui888]
    #21929775 - 07/11/15 05:06 PM (8 years, 6 months ago)

For that first manipulation check out the work on Terror Management Theory - it used manipulations to prime people to consider the afterlife in an effort to create existential thoughts / doubt and a primary affect was enhanced focussed on religious ideas particularly if the participant had any religious background.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory


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Offlineunsui888
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Re: Cognitive Styles, Belief Systems, & Pareidolia [Re: PsiloPsychIn]
    #21933538 - 07/12/15 01:26 PM (8 years, 6 months ago)

Yeah, I never thought of TMT as a priming method for religiosity.

There are also some other priming methods utilizing concepts related to God in sentence-scramble tasks or mere presentation of a God-related concept in which it is rated on how religious the concept is.

I guess rather than pareidolia specifically, I am more interested in apophenia generally. Perhaps in a study I could utilize both visual and auditory stimuli and see if apophenia occurs across modalities, and whether the relationship between belief and apophenia is mediated by field-dependence or some type of cognitive/perceptual style.


--------------------
"a note for asses: what is very convincing, is not necessarily true - it is merely convincing"

primus------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------mama didn't raise no fool


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OfflinePsiloPsychIn
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Re: Cognitive Styles, Belief Systems, & Pareidolia [Re: unsui888]
    #21975902 - 07/21/15 02:42 PM (8 years, 6 months ago)

You may also find the research on illusory correlation (and individual difference moderation of that effect) interesting... Much is focussed on stereotypes but it is a more general phenomenon

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_correlation


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Re: Cognitive Styles, Belief Systems, & Pareidolia [Re: unsui888]
    #21982158 - 07/22/15 09:38 PM (8 years, 6 months ago)

Can't confirmation bias answer everything?


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OfflinePsiloPsychIn
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Re: Cognitive Styles, Belief Systems, & Pareidolia [Re: Cognitive_Shift]
    #21985259 - 07/23/15 02:53 PM (8 years, 6 months ago)

Confirmation bias operates a bit differently from the more general phenomenon meaning making / finding that the original poster seems to be investigating.


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Offlineunsui888
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Re: Cognitive Styles, Belief Systems, & Pareidolia [Re: PsiloPsychIn]
    #21997884 - 07/26/15 12:05 AM (8 years, 6 months ago)

Thanks for the heads up on illusory correlation Psilo!

I think confirmation bias and "patternicity" are probably related in the sense that we may be perceiving patterns that already confirms underlying preconceptions, or something like that. But they are definitely different in more respects.


--------------------
"a note for asses: what is very convincing, is not necessarily true - it is merely convincing"

primus------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------mama didn't raise no fool


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