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Religion alters visual perception
#1
Religion alters visual perception
Quote:Religion alters visual perception
17:50 14 November 2008 by Ewen Callaway
For similar stories, visit the The Human Brain Topic Guide

It might be clichéd to say that religious people see the world differently, but new research finds that Dutch Calvinists notice embedded visual patterns quicker than their atheist compatriots.

Culture has long been known to distort visual perception, says Bernhard Hommel, a psychologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands who led the new study.

For example, one previous experiment found that Asians tend to dart their eyes around a photograph, while North Americans fix on specific people.

To see if religious differences might skew perception, Hommel's team tested 40 Dutch atheist and Calvinist university students, who, religion aside, had similar cultural backgrounds.

Looking inwards
On a computer screen, Hommel's team showed participants a large triangle or square made of either smaller triangles or squares. The volunteers had to focus on either the big object or its component shapes, and indicate whether they were square or triangular.

Both groups recognised the large shapes more quickly than small, embedded ones, but the Calvinists picked out the smaller shapes 30 milliseconds faster than atheists, on average - a small, but significant, difference.

This could reflect a greater focus on self than external distractions for Calvinists, says Hommel.

He suggests it may even be a cognitive consequence of their religion and speculates that Calvinists might be more inward looking than atheists because they have lived their whole lives with an emphasis on minding their own business.

In the future, Hommel plans to give the same test to Catholics, as well as Muslims and Jews, but he must first figure out how to eliminate other cultural differences that could mask any insights. "It doesn't make any sense to compare Iranian Muslims with Dutch atheists," he says.

"This is a thought-provoking study," says Ara Norenzayan, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia. "Their finding is consistent with the literature on cross-cultural cognition - that cultural traditions involving independent view of the self, such as Calvinism, encourage a more feature-based processing style."

I am critical of both the research methods and also the reason behind starting this investigation in the first place.
I don't believe they did tests with a large enough sample size.
Perhaps because I am an Atheist I am automatically on the defense.
Does religious or non-religious upbringing effect brain abnormality/activity?
In what examples have we seen this?
Do atheists lack creativity? How do atheists go about expression?

Do you know if it is possible to access the actual test that they did?

Has anybody read much of Bernhard Hommel - thoughts/opinions?

Comments/opinions of the article and the issues surrounding it?
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#2
RE: Religion alters visual perception
(December 19, 2008 at 5:08 am)puglover Wrote: I am critical of both the research methods [...] I don't believe they did tests with a large enough sample size.

I agree, a sample of 40 people is meaningless.
a 30ms difference is rather small and cannot be interpreted:
I think the average human reflex while driving a car is 1 second ( and 2 seconds when you're drunk) but it can be 0.8 seconds or 1.2 seconds for some people which means a 200 ms difference.
Moreover,the research methods doesn't tell if the 40 people were good at maths or had a good 3D view (I guess people who are good at geometry would have better results for this experiment), we don't even know what they were learning at university. And we don't know how many times they did the experiment before saying "the average difference is..." nor if they did it on a short period (one day) or on a longer one (Because the human results can change with your mood, your health, your environment.
By the way were all the calvinist students hardcore calvinists or not ?

Whatever the conclusions, the experiment can't prove anything I guess.

So just like you puglover I want more details about that test before concluding anything.

About the hypothetical lack of creativity of atheists, I think it's just the theists that have an overwhelming creativity: they manage to create and believe their own fantasy world Tongue .
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#3
RE: Religion alters visual perception
It sounds more like a means in which to descriminate against people.
The last thing we need is another nazi regime.
Non the less.. does our religious or non-religious views alter our brain..
are atheists of a higher IQ and am i prime example of this?
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#4
RE: Religion alters visual perception
It is quite often claimed that atheists have a higher IQ, and I believe Richard Dawkins mentions it from time to time, but I am quite sceptical about that claim.
Best regards,
Leo van Miert
Horsepower is how hard you hit the wall --Torque is how far you take the wall with you
Pastafarian
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#5
RE: Religion alters visual perception
(December 19, 2008 at 9:01 pm)leo-rcc Wrote: It is quite often claimed that atheists have a higher IQ, and I believe Richard Dawkins mentions it from time to time, but I am quite sceptical about that claim.

Yes, I am also aware of this.
Do you know of anybody else notable that mentions this?
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#6
RE: Religion alters visual perception
There are various statistical links between atheism and high IQs. It doesn't mean that an atheist is intelligent, nor does it mean that if you are intelligent you are an atheist. All it means is that from current surveys, a high percentage of the intelligent people are atheists, and a lower percentage of lesser intelligent people are atheists.

There are multiple factors that are thought to be the cause. Primarily that people of high IQ are more likely to have open minds and think outside of any pre-learned dogma, whilst people of less IQ are more prone to believe things because they like them. Of course there are very stupid atheists out there, and there are very intelligent Christians (one of my friends is a fundamentalist and is very clever academically, and Ken Miller is a Roman Catholic evolutionary biologist, although he has thought outside of dogma a bit by denouncing the "literal" interpretation of genesis).

The studies merely show a trend amongst the populace.
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#7
RE: Religion alters visual perception
40 people is it? That's WAY too small.
The MENSA study of IQ was over several years and with a lot of people I think? I'm not exactly sure/forget around how many? Can anyone fill me in on this? Maybe it says in TGD? I could go get it if no one knows.
IQ is not the only kind of intelligence. And its only about averages of course. And no tests like this are ever perfect.
Its just averages of IQ I believe?
EVF
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