Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Neuropsychologia. 2010 Jan;48(2):627-30. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.09.029. Epub 2009 Oct 3.
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 first 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.
上帝和魔鬼的概念在许多文化和宗教中广为人知，通常涉及空间隐喻，但我们的这些概念的心理表征是否会影响视觉认知还不得而知。为了研究对神的概念的接触是否会引起注意力的转移，参与者完成了一个目标检测任务，他们首先看到了与上帝和魔鬼相关的词。我们发现，当目标出现在与上帝（上/右位置）或魔鬼（下/左位置）概念相匹配的位置时，反应时会更快，而且还发现，这些结果不因参与者的宗教信仰而异。这些结果表明，与神有关的隐喻具有很强的空间成分，可以引起注意力的转移，并为内部空间表示与外部环境中注意力分配之间存在极强的联系这一不断增加的证据增添了新内容。
