Neuropsychologia 48 (2010) 627630

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Neuropsychologia
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Thinking of God moves attention

Alison L. Chasteen , Donna C. Burdzy, Jay Pratt
University of Toronto, Canada

a r t i c l e

i n f o

a b s t r a c t
The concepts of God and Devil are well known across many cultures and religions, and often involve spatial metaphors, but it is not well known if our mental representations of these concepts affect visual cognition. To examine if exposure to divine concepts produces shifts of attention, participants completed a target detection task in which they were rst presented with God- and Devil-related words. We found faster RTs when targets appeared at compatible locations with the concepts of God (up/right locations) or Devil (down/left locations), and also found that these results do not vary by participants religiosity. These results indicate that metaphors associated with the divine have strong spatial components that can produce shifts of attention, and add to the growing evidence for an extremely robust connection between internal spatial representations and where attention is allocated in the external environment. 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Article history: Received 29 May 2009 Received in revised form 5 August 2009 Accepted 27 September 2009 Available online 3 October 2009 Keywords: Attention Metaphor Cueing

How strongly do we associate God and Devil with our physical world? Humans have long used spatial metaphors for abstract concepts of the divine, ranging from Mt. Olympus and the underground Hades in ancient Greece to the current conceptions of Heaven and Hell (Chelhod, 1973; Meier, Hauser, Robinson, Friesen, & Schjeldahl, 2007). Such metaphors are useful as they provide a common metric, physical space, to which abstract information can be bounded and communicated to other people (Barsalou, 1999; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Indeed, such spatial metaphors are so overlearned and pervasive in divine concepts that many religious and cultural traditions have representations in either or both vertical and horizontal space (Chelhod, 1973). For instance, people routinely use the vertical dimension to indicate the locations of God and the Devil, referring to God as residing in the high Heavens (e.g., Taylor, 2000; Walls, 2008) and the Devil as residing in the Underworld (e.g., Beer, 2000; Jones, 2005), and recent research has shown peoples associations of God/up and Devil/down operate implicitly (Meier et al., 2007). Spatial metaphors associating divinity with right and left are also prevalent, with Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scripture often associating the right or right-handedness with Gods righteousness, goodness and power while the left is at best viewed with suspicion (Hertz, 1973; Wile, 1934). The strongest leftright symbolism in Christianity is to be found in the context of the Final Judgment, where God or Christ points to the elect with his right hand, while the damned are condemned by his left (Wile, 1934). Similarly, there is an extremely strong rightleft association in Islam; for example, in the Koran, the elect are described as sit-

Corresponding author at: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 3G3. E-mail address: chasteen@psych.utoronto.ca (A.L. Chasteen). 0028-3932/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.09.029

ting at the right of Allah, while the damned are relegated to His left (Chelhod, 1973). Given the reliance on spatial metaphors in concepts of the divine, it is possible that merely thinking of concepts of God or Devil might invoke brain activity associated with the processing of spatial information. One consequence of such processing that has been recently discovered is that activating internal representations of space generates shifts of attention to specic regions of the external visual eld. For example, it has been shown that perceiving numbers activates an internal mental number line, which in turn produces shifts of attention to regions of external space consistent with the perceived number (e.g., low digits produce leftward shifts of attention, high digits to the right; Fischer, Castel, Dodd, & Pratt, 2003). Similarly, time metaphors also appear to be associated with space (Boroditsky, 2000), with recent work showing that exposure to time words shifts attention to spatially compatible locations (e.g., past/left, future/right; Weger & Pratt, 2008). If the metaphors we use to represent concepts of the divine are closely associated with space, then activating such concepts may generate shifts of attention. Indeed, prefrontal cortex, which is heavily involved in the representation of abstract concepts (e.g., Miller, Freedman, & Wallis, 2002) has strong connections to posterior parietal cortex (e.g., Buschman & Miller, 2007), which is involved in both spatial and attentional processing (e.g., Colby & Goldberg, 1999; Corbetta, Kincade, Ollinger, McAvoy, & Shulman, 2000). Given the connections between these two regions, it is quite likely that having people merely think of God would move their attention. Divine metaphors are especially interesting to investigate because of two unique properties. One property is that unlike numbers or time, God and Devil concepts are multidimensional, and it is possible that God concepts generate shifts of attention both up and right, and Devil concepts generate shifts both down and left. The

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A.L. Chasteen et al. / Neuropsychologia 48 (2010) 627630

Fig. 1. (a) Typical trial sequence. (b) Positive (target detection faster for God words) and negative (target detection faster for Devil words) cueing effects for all four target locations. (c) Scatterplot of cueing effects by religiosity (all participants).

other unique property is that people vary greatly in their belief in divine concepts, which is quite unlike the concepts that have been previously examined in terms of generating attention shifts (e.g., a 2 is always a 2, and it is always between 1 and 3). Thus, it is possible that shifts of attention might be modulated by the degree to which people believe in the divine. This distinctive feature permits a rare opportunity to examine individual differences in the strength of association between spatial metaphors and visual attention. To test these unique properties of divine concepts, participants completed two target detection tasks, one in which they responded to targets appearing horizontally (left or right of xation), and another in which targets appeared vertically (above or below xation). Prior to the appearance of the targets, participants were exposed to a brief cue, which was sometimes a word related to God or Devil. Given the ubiquity of the associations between up/down and left/right and the divine in religion and culture, we predicted that participants would be faster to detect targets that appeared in locations that were spatially compatible to the concepts of God and Devil. Specically, participants should detect targets faster in either the up or right-side locations when they were rst presented with God-related words than Devil-related words. In contrast, participants should be faster to respond to the down or left-side locations when they were rst presented with Devil- than Godrelated words. In addition, we assessed participants religiosity in order to determine whether there are individual differences in the ability of spatial metaphors to shift attention.
1. Methods 1.1. Participants Participants were 28 University of Toronto undergraduate students (10 male, 18 female) who received a course credit in exchange for their participation. Sixty percent reported being Christian, 13% Muslim, 8% Buddhist, and 19% did not ascribe to any set of religious beliefs. 1.2. Procedure Participants completed two counterbalanced simple detection tasks, a horizontal task and a vertical task. To ensure that participants were focused at the center of

the display on the monitor, a closed-circuit TV system was used to monitor their eye gaze throughout the duration of the trials. For both tasks, participants were positioned with a chinrest 44 cm from a computer screen and were instructed to xate on a central white cross (0.3 ) on the black background. After a 1000 ms delay, either one of six different religious words (consisting of three Devil-related words: Devil, Satan and Lucifer and three God-related words: God, Lord and Almighty) or one of six different control words (Flower, Ball, House, Banana, Door, Pencil), appeared in the middle of the screen in place of the cross (white 14-point arial font). Participants were instructed to determine if the presented word was religious in nature or not; if religious, they were to respond to the following detection target whereas if not religious they were to withhold any further response on that trial (catch trials to ensure participants were processing the words). This was done to ensure the participants attended to, and processed, the presented words. The participants were also told that the targets would be appearing randomly in the two locations. In the horizontal task, after a random delay (800, 900, 1000, 1100 or 1200 ms), a detection target (a white 0.4 degree square 0.4 degree square) was presented 7 to left or right of the physical midpoint of the central word (see Fig. 1a). Participants responded with their dominant hand by pressing the space bar as soon as they detected the target (if the presented word was religious in nature). The vertical task was the same except that the detection targets appeared 8 above or below the midpoint of the central word. Simple keypress responses were used to eliminate the possibility that any differences in detection of the targets could be due to stimulusresponses mappings that can occur with choice responses. The type of word (God-related, Devil-related or neutral) and target location (left or right for the horizontal task, above or below for the vertical task) were equally likely on any given trial. Each task consisted of 180 trials, with short breaks after the 60th and the 120th trials. After completing the two detection tasks, participants completed a questionnaire on general demographic information and the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory (Oldeld, 1971). In addition, they also completed the Nearness to God Scale (Gorsuch & Smith, 1983) and the Religious Fundamentalism Scale (Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992).

2. Results A preliminary analysis showed that the words Almighty and Lucifer did not inuence RTs, so the following analyses were conducted using the words God, Lord, Devil, and Satan (mean RTs are shown in Table 1). As pilot testing determined that the attentional effect was present during the range of SOAs, SOA was not included as a factor in the analyses. To determine the effect of the divine words on attention, cueing effects were calculated as a difference in target detection times between Devil- and God-related

A.L. Chasteen et al. / Neuropsychologia 48 (2010) 627630 Table 1 Mean RTs for God- and Devil-related words in both the vertical and horizontal tasks. Standard error of the mean is shown in brackets. God-related Vertical target Up target Down target Horizontal target Right target Left target 320 (10.4) 334 (10.0) 318 (11.5) 332 (13.0) Devil-related 332 (10.8) 327 (10.4) 334 (12.6) 320 (12.0)

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words. God-related cueing effects (detection faster for God than Devil words) were found for targets above and right of xation (see Fig. 1b). Devil-related cueing effects (detection slower for God than Devil words) were found for targets below and left of xation. These cueing effects were conrmed by separate 2 (concept: God, Devil) 2 (target location) analyses of variance performed on the mean detection times for the vertical (above, below) and horizontal tasks (left and right). Concept by target interactions were found for both the vertical [F(1,27) = 5.5, p < .03, prep = 0.908] and horizontal tasks [F(1,27) = 12.5, p < .001, prep = 0.986].1 Catch trial errors (responding with a neutral word present) were rare (<0.3% for both tasks). To determine if individual differences in religiosity or religious afliation plays a role in the spatial component of divine concepts, two additional analyses were performed. For religiosity, participants scores on the Nearness to God Scale and the Religious Fundamentalism Scale (which were highly correlated with each other, r = .76, p < .0001) were converted to z-scores and an average measure of religiosity was calculated. An overall cueing effect was then calculated for each participant by averaging across the cueing effects for the vertical and horizontal tasks. As can be seen in Fig. 1c, regressing participants religiosity scores on the averaged cueing effects revealed that there was no relationship between religiosity and cueing effects (r2 = 0.002). In a second analysis, we investigated whether religious afliation might qualify the cueing effects produced by divine concepts. In particular, we were interested in whether believers and nonbelievers differ in the degree to which visual attention is inuenced by thoughts of the divine. To operationalize religious afliation, we selected the two largest groups and conducted 2 (group: Christian, nonbelievers) 2 (word) 2 (target) ANOVAs on the horizontal and vertical tasks. No main effects nor interactions, Fs(1,20) < 1, were found in either task. Thus, there is no evidence that religiosity or religious afliation affected the attentional orienting effects. 3. Discussion As predicted, participants were faster to detect targets when they appeared in locations that were spatially compatible with cues related to the concept of the divine. Specically, simply determining whether God-related words were religious in nature generated shifts of attention to upward and rightward regions of the visual eld. Similarly, Devil-related words invoked attentional shifts to downward and leftward regions of the visual

eld. Thus, activating internal representations of the abstract concepts of the divine generated covert shifts of attention in external space consistent with the spatial metaphors employed by many cultures and religions. Moreover, the orienting of attention occurred regardless of the religiosity of the participants. These results show that activating internal representations of abstract concepts of the divine generates shifts of attention in external space consistent with the spatial metaphors employed by many cultures and religions. Thus, these ndings demonstrate that thinking of God or the Devil inuences our external actions. Indeed, it can be said that thinking of the divine determines what we see, as such concepts inuence where our attention is allocated, which in turn inuences what visual information we will obtain from our environment. Importantly, this allocation of attention occurred regardless of the religious afliation or religiosity of the participants, indicating the extent to which spatial metaphors of the divine are embedded in many cultures. These ndings show the depth to which spatial information permeates abstract concepts, which suggests that the default framework for abstract concepts is spatial in nature. Our ndings, in conjunction with others that have shown a variety of abstract concepts can inuence the allocation of attention in the eld (Fischer et al., 2003; Weger & Pratt, 2008), are consistent with research demonstrating the strong connections between prefrontal cortex (where concepts are represented) and posterior parietal cortex (spatial representations and attention allocation) (Buschman & Miller, 2007; Colby & Goldberg, 1999; Corbetta et al., 2000; Miller et al., 2002). In terms of whether the orienting of attention generated by abstract concepts is endogenous (volitional) or exogenous (reexive), the answer might fall between the strict classic denitions of these terms. Our suggestion is that such shifts of attention are best classied as involuntary but top-down. The orienting command is clearly top-down as there is no sensory activity in the periphery to pull attention away from xation. Consistent with this notion, there is evidence that top-down attention (a) is engaged when activation ows from frontal to parietal cortex (Buschman & Miller, 2007) and (b) activates posterior parietal cortex, particularly the intraparietal sulcus (Corbetta et al., 2000). Moreover, the attentional orienting in response to numbers can be modulated by specic task instructions (Galfano, Rusconi, & Umilt, 2006). There is, however, no evidence that participants are volitionally shifting attention as part of a deliberate strategy on their own part when they encounter conceptual information; rather, processing a variety of abstract concepts appears to be sufcient to instigate shifts of attention. In this sense, the classically dened terms of endogenous and exogenous may now be insufcient to categorize an expanding variety of attentional phenomenon. Considering top-down and bottom-up, and volitional and involuntary, as separate axis on a multidimensional continuum may be a more fruitful approach for the future. In sum, the present study demonstrates that even a highly abstract concept such as God can lead individuals to orient their attention to spatially compatible locations. These ndings provide further evidence for the power of metaphors and the strong spatial components involved with these mental representations. Indeed, it appears that we associate God and Devil quite strongly with our physical world.

1 Separate paired t-tests were conducted on the two divine word types for both the horizontal and vertical tasks. For the horizontal tasks, right targets were detected faster when preceded by God-related words [t(27) = 2.76, p < .011] than Devil-related words, and left targets were detected faster when preceded by Devilrelated than God-related words [t(27) = 2.80, p < .01]. For the vertical tasks, up targets were detected faster when preceded by God- than Devil-related words [t(27) = 2.77, p < .011] and down targets were detected marginally faster when preceded by Devilthan God-related words [t(27) = 1.60, p < .15].

Acknowledgements This research was supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada awarded to J. Pratt.

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A.L. Chasteen et al. / Neuropsychologia 48 (2010) 627630 Gorsuch, R. L., & Smith, C. S. (1983). Attributions of responsibility to God: An interaction of religious beliefs and outcomes. Journal for the Scientic Study of Religion, 22, 340352. Hertz, R. (1973). The pre-eminence of the right hand: A study in religious polarity. (Originally published 1909). In R. Needham (Ed.), Right & left: Essays on dual symbolic classication (pp. 2041). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jones, L. (Ed.). (2005). Encyclopedia of religion. Farmington Hills: Thomson Gale. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the esh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. New York: Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group. Meier, B. P., Hauser, D. J., Robinson, M. D., Friesen, C. K., & Schjeldahl, K. (2007). Whats up with god? Vertical space as a representation of the divine. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(5), 699710. Miller, E. K., Freedman, D. J., & Willis, J. D. (2002). The prefrontal cortex: Categories, concepts and cognition. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London, 357, 11231136. Oldeld, R. C. (1971). The assessment and analysis of handedness: The Edinburgh inventory. Neuropsychologia, 9, 97113. Taylor, R. A. (2000). Death and the afterlife: A cultural encyclopedia. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO Inc. Weger, U. W., & Pratt, J. (2008). Time ies like an arrow: Space-time compatibility effects suggest the use of a mental timeline. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15(2), 426430. Walls, J. L. (Ed.). (2008). Oxford handbook of eschatology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wile, I. (1934). Handedness: Right and left. Boston: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard Co.

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