Selective Visual Attention and Motivated Misperceptions in Social Information Processing

人们接触到视觉图像是很常见的。每晚的新闻广播和社交媒体订阅源通常包括与民调结果、经济预测和人们对各种社会问题的立场有关的图像。其中许多意象传达了一套特定的文化信仰和价值观，而且往往是以一种非常情绪化或激动人心的方式。尽管这种充满意识形态色彩的图像很常见，但人们对这些图像的看法是否相似还不清楚。过去的研究表明，一个人自己的意识形态(他们与他人共享的文化信仰和价值观)提供了一种心理视角，通过这种视角来解释信息和得出结论。事实上，人们可以根据自己的意识形态观点和维护这些观点的动机，从相同的信息中得出非常不同的结论。这个项目测试人们的意识形态价值观是否不仅塑造了他们的判断，而且从一开始就影响了他们处理和感知视觉信息的方式。这项研究整合了包括社会心理学和视觉科学在内的社会和行为科学的许多学科，以测试一个模型，该模型解释了意识形态威胁如何影响早期的注意和感知过程。在几个有争议的社会问题上，这项工作探索了基于威胁的人们在视觉上表示信息的差异，检查了这些过程背后的注意机制，并展示了基于威胁的情绪调节和行为误解的下游后果。几项研究一致探索了早期的注意力和知觉过程，这些过程有助于调节情绪(当效率低时)，并促进防御行动(当效率高时)。在一个人们越来越多地接触视觉信息的时代，研究人们如何感知他们遇到的信息提供了对驱动社会行为的过程的新见解。了解人们如何感知和解释图表中包含的信息有助于改进教育课程和媒体素养课程的设计，以帮助个人评估和解释媒体信息。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.