Does Global and Local Vision Have an Impact on Creative and Analytic Thought? Two Failed Replications

No Correlation Between Mood or Motivation and the Processing of Global and Local Information

Mood has been argued to impact the breadth of human attention, but the empirical evidence supporting this claim remains shaky. Gable and Harmon-Jones (2008) have attributed previous empirical inconsistencies regarding the effect of mood on attentional breath to a critical role of approach/avoidance motivation. They demonstrated that the combination of positive affect with high, but not with low, motivational intensity improves performance during processing local information and impairs performance during processing global information. The latter, but not the former, was replicated by Domachowska et al. (2016). Since we were interested in the modulation of attention by valence and motivation, and considering the inconsistencies in the findings, we replicated the critical experiments of both studies in four online experiments but found no significant effect of either valence or motivational intensity on attention. Taken together, our evidence casts doubt on a systematic relationship between mood or motivation on the one hand and global/local processing on the other.

Accelerating reading via local priming

Visual nonlinguistic local and global priming can change one's state of mind and influence other upcoming tasks. Reading involves both detailed and higher-level global processing. Little is known about the effects of visual non-linguistic priming on lower level processing of words, as well as about the potentially higher-level processing of written information. In two experiments, the effects of global versus local priming on single word reading (Experiment 1) as well as text reading (Experiment 2) were investigated in adults. The results revealed facilitation effects of local priming on single word reading as well as on text reading rate, with no impairment of reading accuracy and comprehension. These novel results are further interpreted within different cognitive and neurological frameworks. In addition, clinical and research implications for the local/global attention and reading domain are 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.