Abstract
Increasing evidence suggests that religious practice induces systematic biases in attentional control. We used Navon's global–local task to compare attentional bias in Taiwanese Zen Buddhists and Taiwanese atheists; two groups brought up in the same country and culture and matched with respect to race, intelligence, sex, and age. Given the Buddhist emphasis on compassion for the physical and social environment, we expected a more global bias in Buddhist than in Atheist participants. In line with these expectations, Buddhists showed a larger global-precedence effect and increased interference from global distracters when processing local information. This pattern reinforces the idea that people's attentional processing style reflects biases rewarded by their religious practices.
Highlights
Human behavior is commonly proactive rather than reactive: We carry out planned actions to reach particular goals rather than wait for environmental events to get us moving
Analysis of social value orientation revealed significant differences between Zen Buddhists and Atheists participants on the variable prosocial behavior, χ2 = 7.35, df = 3, p = 0.04; Zen Buddhists were oriented to prosocial behavior to a larger extend than Atheists
Our findings show that Zen Buddhists and Atheists differ in the way they attend to global and local features of visual stimuli
Summary
Human behavior is commonly proactive rather than reactive: We carry out planned actions to reach particular goals rather than wait for environmental events to get us moving. Exerting executive control has been compared to parameterizing processing routines in a computer program and a number of possible control parameters have been suggested (Logan and Gordon, 2001). One of these parameters (Logan and Gordon’s “c”) is assumed to control the grain size of perceptual analysis, that is, whether one is attending more to global or more to local aspects of stimulus events (Logan, 1996). Most of the evidence comes from studies using versions of Navon’s (1977) global–local task In this task, participants are presented with hierarchically constructed stimuli that can be analyzed at two different levels at least, such as larger letters or shapes made of smaller letters or shapes (e.g., a large H made of small S’s). The size of this global-precedence effect (i.e., the difference in reaction times and/or error rates when responding to the local vs. the global level) can differ substantially between individuals or groups
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