Selective Visual Attention and Motivated Misperceptions in Social Information Processing

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It is very common for people to be exposed to visual imagery. Nightly news broadcasts and social media feeds often include imagery associated with poll results, economic projections, and people taking positions on various social issues. Much of that imagery communicates a particular set of cultural beliefs and values, and often in a very emotional or evocative manner. Although such ideologically-charged imagery is common, it is not clear that people view these images similarly. Past research has shown that a person’s own ideology (cultural beliefs and values they share with others) provides a psychological lens through which information is interpreted and conclusions drawn. Indeed, people can reach very different conclusions from the same information depending on their own ideological perspectives and their motivations to maintain them. This project tests whether people’s ideological values not only shape their judgments but also influence how they attend to and perceive visual information in the first place.This research integrates many disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences, including social psychology and vision science, to test a model that accounts for how ideological threats affect early-stage attentional and perceptual processes. Across several contested societal issues, this work explores threat-based differences in how people visually represent information, examines attentional mechanisms underlying these processes, and demonstrates downstream consequences of threat-based misperceptions for emotion regulation and behavior. In concert, several studies explore early-stage attentional and perceptual processes that help regulate emotions (when efficacy is low) and promote defensive action (when efficacy is high). In an era in which people increasingly encounter visual information, studying how people perceive the information they encounter provides new insights into the processes that drive social behavior. Understanding how people perceive and interpret information contained in graphs and figures helps to improve educational curricula and the design of media literacy courses that aid individuals in evaluating and interpreting media messages.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.