Seeing Is Believing

Seeing Is Believing: 700 Years of Scientific and Medical Illustration. New York Public Library, New York, October 1999–February 19,2000.     

Believing Is Seeing: Fixation Duration Predicts Implicit Negative Attitudes

A prototypical finding of social cognition is that social experiences influence later performance even though those experiences are not introspectively available. Building on social cognition research on implicit attitudes, we evaluate whether ethnic category/attribute pairs influence eye movements during the Implicit Association Test (IAT, Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz 1998). Results show that fixation duration predicted implicit attitudes such that when the category/attribute pairs disconfirmed one''s implicit negative attitude fixation duration toward that pair increased. The present research provides evidence that eye movements and implicit processes inherent in the IAT are more broadly connected than previously thought.     

Climate Change: Believing and Seeing Implies Adapting

Knowledge of factors that trigger human response to climate change is crucial for effective climate change policy communication. Climate change has been claimed to have low salience as a risk issue because it cannot be directly experienced. Still, personal factors such as strength of belief in local effects of climate change have been shown to correlate strongly with responses to climate change and there is a growing literature on the hypothesis that personal experience of climate change (and/or its effects) explains responses to climate change. Here we provide, using survey data from 845 private forest owners operating in a wide range of bio-climatic as well as economic-social-political structures in a latitudinal gradient across Europe, the first evidence that the personal strength of belief and perception of local effects of climate change, highly significantly explain human responses to climate change. A logistic regression model was fitted to the two variables, estimating expected probabilities ranging from 0.07 (SD ±0.01) to 0.81 (SD ±0.03) for self-reported adaptive measures taken. Adding socio-demographic variables improved the fit, estimating expected probabilities ranging from 0.022 (SD ±0.008) to 0.91 (SD ±0.02). We conclude that to explain and predict adaptation to climate change, the combination of personal experience and belief must be considered.     

Seeing rainbows

Mammals generally have colour vision inferior to that of other vertebrates. This is partially redressed in primates, but the underlying mechanisms differ in Old World and New World primate groups. How has this occurred and what were the key events in the molecular evolution of primate colour vision?     

Seeing the Big Picture: Size Perception Is More Context Sensitive in the Presence of Others

This paper tests the hypothesis that social presence influences size perception by increasing context sensitivity. Consistent with Allport’s prediction, we expected to find greater context sensitivity in participants who perform a visual task in the presence of other people (i.e., in co-action) than in participants who perform the task in isolation. Supporting this hypothesis, participants performing an Ebbinghaus illusion-based task in co-action showed greater size illusions than those performing the task in isolation. Specifically, participants in a social context had greater difficulty perceiving the correct size of a target circle and ignoring its surroundings. Analyses of delta plot functions suggest a mechanism of interference monitoring, since that when individuals take longer to respond, they are better able to ignore the surrounding circles. However, this type of monitoring interference was not moderated by social presence. We discuss how this lack of moderation might be the reason why the impact of social presence on context sensitivity is able to be detected in tasks such as the Ebbinghaus illusion.