The tree to the left, the forest to the right: political attitude and perceptual bias

Analytic and holistic cognitive style as a set of independent manifests: Evidence from a validation study of six measurement instruments

Cognitive styles are commonly studied constructs in cognitive psychology. The theory of field dependence-independence was one of the most important cognitive styles. Yet in the past, its measurement had significant shortcomings in validity and reliability. The theory of analytic and holistic cognitive styles attempted to extend this theory and overcome its shortcomings. Unfortunately, the psychometric properties of its measurement methods were not properly verified. Furthermore, new statistical approaches, such as analysis of reaction times, have been overlooked by current research. The aim of this pre-registered study was to verify the psychometric properties (i.e., factor structure, split-half reliability, test-retest reliability, discriminant validity with intelligence and personality, and divergent, concurrent and predictive validity) of several methods routinely applied in the field. We developed/adapted six methods based on self-report questionnaires, rod-and-frame principles, embedded figures, and hierarchical figures. The analysis was conducted on 392 Czech participants, with two data collection waves. The results indicate that the use of methods based on the rod-and-frame principle may be unreliable, demonstrating no absence of association with intelligence. The use of embedded and hierarchical figures is recommended. The self-report questionnaire used in this study showed an unsatisfactory factor structure and also cannot be recommended without futher validation on independent samples. The findings also did not correspond with the original two-dimensional theory.

Most Findings Obtained With Untimed Visual Illusions Are Confounded

Visual illusions have been studied extensively, but their time course has not. Here we show, in a sample of more than 550 people, that unrestricted presentation times-as opposed to presentations lasting only a single second-weaken the Ebbinghaus illusion, strengthen lightness contrast with double increments, and do not alter lightness contrast with double decrements. When presentation time is unrestricted, these illusions are affected in the same way (decrease, increase, no change) by how long observers look at them. Our results imply that differences in illusion magnitude between individuals or groups are confounded with differences in inspection time, no matter whether stimuli are evaluated in matching, adjustment, or untimed comparison tasks. We offer an explanation for why these three illusions progress differently, and we spell out how our findings challenge theories of lightness, theories of global-local processing, and the interpretation of all research that has investigated visual illusions, or used them as tools, without considering inspection time.

Sensitivity to social norm violation is related to political orientation

Human behavior is framed by several social structures. In the present study, we focus on two of the most important determinants of social structures: social norms and political orientation. Social norms are implicit models of shared expectations about how people should behave in different social contexts. Although humans are very sensitive to violations in social norms, there are important individual differences in our sensitivity to these violations. The second concept this study focuses on is political orientation that is define by a continuum from left (liberal) to right (conservative). Individual political orientation has been found to be related to various individual traits, such as cognitive style or sensitivity to negative stimuli. Here, we propose to study the relation between sensitivity to social norm violation and political orientation. Participants completed a task presenting scenarios with different degrees of social norm violation and a questionnaire to measure their political opinions on economic and identity issues. Using hierarchical regressions, we show that individual differences in sensitivity to social norm violation are partly explained by political orientation, and more precisely by the identity axis. The more individuals have right-oriented political opinions, the more they are sensitive to social norm violation, even when multiple demographics variables are considered. Our results suggest that political orientation, especially according to identity issues, is a significant factor of individual differences in social norm processing.

Cultural variations in global and local attention and eye-movement patterns during the perception of complex visual scenes: Comparison of Czech and Taiwanese university students

Previous research on cross-cultural differences in visual attention has been inconclusive. Some studies have suggested the existence of systematic differences in global and local attention and context sensitivity, while others have produced negative or mixed results. The objective in this study was to examine the similarities and differences in holistic and analytic cognitive styles in a sample of Czech and Taiwanese university students. Two cognitive tasks were conducted: a Compound Figures Test and a free-viewing scene perception task which manipulated several focal objects and measured eye-movement patterns. An analysis of the reaction times in the Compound Figures Test showed no clear differences between either sample. An analysis of eye-movement metrics showed certain differences between the samples. While Czechs tended to focus relatively more on the focal objects measured by the number of fixations, the Taiwanese subjects spent more time fixating on the background. The results were consistent for scenes with one or two focal objects. The results of a correlation analysis of both tasks showed that they were unrelated. These results showed certain differences between the samples in visual perception but were not as systematic as the theory of holistic and analytic cognitive styles would suggest. An alternative model of cross-cultural differences in cognition and perception is discussed.

The local perceptual bias of a non-remote and educated population

In 1977, Navon argued that perception is biased towards the processing of global as opposed to local visual information (or the forest before the trees) and implicitly assumed this to be true across places and cultures. Previous work with normally developing participants has supported this assumption except in one extremely remote African population. Here, we explore local-global perceptual bias in normally developing African participants living much less remotely than the African population tested previously. These participants had access to modern artefacts and education but presented with a local bias on a similarity-matching Navon task, contrary to Navon's assumptions. Nevertheless, the urban and more educated amongst these participants showed a weaker local bias than the rural and less educated participants, suggesting an effect of urbanicity and education in driving differences in perceptual bias. Our findings confirm the impact of experience on perceptual bias and suggest that differences in the impact of education and urbanicity on lifestyles around the world can result in profound differences in perceptual style. In addition, they suggest that local bias is more common than previously thought; a global bias might not be universal after all.

Cognitive underpinnings of nationalistic ideology in the context of Brexit

Nationalistic identities often play an influential role in citizens' voting behavior and political engagement. Nationalistic ideologies tend to have firm categories and rules for what belongs to and represents the national culture. In a sample of 332 UK citizens, we tested whether strict categorization of stimuli and rules in objective cognitive tasks would be evident in strongly nationalistic individuals. Using voting behavior and attitudes from the United Kingdom's 2016 EU referendum, we found that a flexible representation of national identity and culture was linked to cognitive flexibility in the ideologically neutral Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and Remote Associates Test, and to self-reported flexibility under uncertainty. Path analysis revealed that subjective and objective cognitive inflexibility predicted heightened authoritarianism, nationalism, conservatism, and system justification, and these in turn were predictive of support for Brexit and opposition to immigration, the European Union, and free movement of labor. This model accounted for 47.6% of the variance in support for Brexit. Path analysis models were also predictive of participants' sense of personal attachment to the United Kingdom, signifying that individual differences in cognitive flexibility may contribute toward ideological thinking styles that shape both nationalistic attitudes and personal sense of nationalistic identity. These findings further suggest that emotionally neutral "cold" cognitive information processing-and not just "hot" emotional cognition-may play a key role in ideological behavior and identity.

The politics of insight

Previous studies showed that liberals and conservatives differ in cognitive style. Liberals are more flexible, and tolerant of complexity and novelty, whereas conservatives are more rigid, are more resistant to change, and prefer clear answers. We administered a set of compound remote associate problems, a task extensively used to differentiate problem-solving styles (via insight or analysis). Using this task, several researches have proven that self-reports, which differentiate between insight and analytic problem-solving, are reliable and are associated with two different neural circuits. In our research we found that participants self-identifying with distinct political orientations demonstrated differences in problem-solving strategy. Liberals solved significantly more problems via insight instead of in a step-by-step analytic fashion. Our findings extend previous observations that self-identified political orientations reflect differences in cognitive styles. More specifically, we show that type of political orientation is associated with problem-solving strategy. The data converge with previous neurobehavioural and cognitive studies indicating a link between cognitive style and the psychological mechanisms that mediate political beliefs.

The hand in motion of liberals and conservatives reveals the differential processing of positive and negative information

Recent research revealed that political conservatives and liberals differ in the processing of valenced information. In particular, conservatives (vs. liberals) tend to weigh negative information more than positive information in their perception of the physical and social world. In the present work, we further investigated the ideology-based asymmetries in the processing of negative and positive information examining both the attention-grabbing power of negative information and the trajectories of the movements performed by respondents when required to categorize positive and negative stimuli. To this end we employed a modified version of the Mouse-Tracking procedure (Freeman & Ambady, 2010), recording hand movements during the execution of categorization tasks. Results showed that conservatives were indeed slower to start and execute response actions to negative stimuli, and, more specifically, the trajectories of their movements signaled avoidance tendencies aimed at increasing the distance from negative stimuli. In addition, this pattern of findings emerged both when participants were asked to categorize the stimuli according to their valence and when the same stimuli had to be categorized on the basis of irrelevant perceptual features. Overall, results demonstrate that conservatives and liberals process valenced information differently, perform different spontaneous movements when exposed to them, and that such asymmetries are largely independent from current processing goals.