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...e ones, and to enhance self-worth and esteem. This motivation in the psychological literature has several names, such as motivated reasoning, self-affirmation, wishful thinking, and defensive processing, and has been shown to have a widespread influence in shaping how people think about their world, that is, how they interpret information of which they are consciously aware. This motive has been shown to influence such higher order tasks as judging other people, evaluating the self, predicting the future, and making sense of the past (for reviews, see Baumeister & Newman, 1994; Dunning, 2001; Kunda, 1990; Pittman, 1998). In the studies that follow, we examine the scope of motivated reasoning to see if it crosses the boundary between how people think about their outside world and how they perceive it. Certainly, motivated reasoning influences conscious, deliberate, and effortful judgments, but we ask if it can constrain what information reaches consciousness in the first place. Does the impact of motivated reasoning or wishful thinking, more specifically, extend down to preconscious processing of visual information? We test, in essence, whether people literally are prone to see what they want ...

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...985). Others lamented that the relative unfamiliarity of threatening words, and not their motivational punch, was the key ingredient that slowed participants’ recognition responses (Adkins, 1956; Howes & Solomon, 1950). As such, the influence of motivational states on perception was never firmly established. And as the 1950s closed the study of the relation between motivational states and perception, this pursuit fell by the wayside and ceased to have the major impact—if any at all—enjoyed by other insights from the New Look tradition (Dunning, 2001; Erdelyi, 1974; Gilbert, 1998; Jones, 1985; Nisbett & Ross, 1980). Perception of Ambiguous Figures In the present research, we examined the impact of motivational states on perception by focusing on interpretations of ambiguous or reversible figures—visual stimuli, like the famous Necker cube, that people can interpret in two different ways but for which they tend to see only one interpretation at any given time (Long & Toppino, 2004; Rock & Mitchener, 1992). In each of five studies, we told participants that they were about to be assigned to one of two experimental tasks, one being much more desirable than the other. We also told participants that a comput...

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...if they knew the measure was being taken at all. As was the case in the previous studies, we asked participants to provide a verbal or written report of whether they had seen a horse or a seal after being shown a figure that could be interpreted as either. However, in addition, we also measured participants’ eye movements to see if they would give clues as to how participants had interpreted the figure. Recent evidence suggests that initial eye movements on presentation of a stimulus are not influenced by conscious processing (Allopenna, Magnuson, & Tanenhaus, 1998; Richardson & Spivey, 2000; Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995). Thus, we examined whether the first saccade (eye movement) after presentation of the ambiguous figure would be to a label on the computer screen marked “farm animal” or one marked “sea creature.” We expected that such saccades would indicate that participants had interpreted the figure in a way that placed them in a favorable circumstance. Method Participants. Participants were 79 undergraduates at Cornell University completing the study in exchange for extra credit. Procedure. Participants came into the lab alone and were seated approximately 20 in. from a 21-in. Apple cinema-display monit...

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...uenced the disambiguation of the figure. Those who were motivated to see farm animals were more likely to look to the farm animal box than were those who were motivated to see sea animals, 2(1, N 59) 9.90, p .002. We should note that scores on our eye-tracking measure significantly correlated with the score participants received from their explicit reports (Spearman’s .42, p .001). Study 4: Converging Evidence from Lexical Decision Data Study 4 served as a conceptual replication of Study 3 but used a different type of indirect measure of perception. A good deal of research (e.g., Neely, 1991) suggests that a picture of an object serves as a prime for concepts associated with that object, even if people are not aware that they have seen the object (e.g., Loach & Mari-Beffa, 2003; Raymond, Shapiro, & Arnell, 1992). Thus, in Study 3, we motivated participants to interpret an ambiguous figure as either a horse or a seal. Participants again provided an explicit report of the interpretation they saw. However, we also collected reaction time data to gain an additional measure of whether participants had specifically seen the interpretation they had reported—and only that interpretation. ...

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... 9.90, p .002. We should note that scores on our eye-tracking measure significantly correlated with the score participants received from their explicit reports (Spearman’s .42, p .001). Study 4: Converging Evidence from Lexical Decision Data Study 4 served as a conceptual replication of Study 3 but used a different type of indirect measure of perception. A good deal of research (e.g., Neely, 1991) suggests that a picture of an object serves as a prime for concepts associated with that object, even if people are not aware that they have seen the object (e.g., Loach & Mari-Beffa, 2003; Raymond, Shapiro, & Arnell, 1992). Thus, in Study 3, we motivated participants to interpret an ambiguous figure as either a horse or a seal. Participants again provided an explicit report of the interpretation they saw. However, we also collected reaction time data to gain an additional measure of whether participants had specifically seen the interpretation they had reported—and only that interpretation. Just after viewing the figure, participants completed a lexical decision task (LDT) in which they were presented with letter strings and had to decide whether those letter strings formed English words. Each participant saw ...

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...t suspect were designed to test which interpretation they had seen—if they knew the measure was being taken at all. As was the case in the previous studies, we asked participants to provide a verbal or written report of whether they had seen a horse or a seal after being shown a figure that could be interpreted as either. However, in addition, we also measured participants’ eye movements to see if they would give clues as to how participants had interpreted the figure. Recent evidence suggests that initial eye movements on presentation of a stimulus are not influenced by conscious processing (Allopenna, Magnuson, & Tanenhaus, 1998; Richardson & Spivey, 2000; Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995). Thus, we examined whether the first saccade (eye movement) after presentation of the ambiguous figure would be to a label on the computer screen marked “farm animal” or one marked “sea creature.” We expected that such saccades would indicate that participants had interpreted the figure in a way that placed them in a favorable circumstance. Method Participants. Participants were 79 undergraduates at Cornell University completing the study in exchange for extra credit. Procedure. Participants came into the lab al...

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... it truly is. Decades of research in psychology, however, tend to undermine the assumption that what people see or hear is an exact replica of what is out in the world, in two different ways. First, perception is selective. People are not aware of everything that is going on around them. Consider, for example, recent studies of attentional blindness. Of undergraduates asked to monitor how many times people in a videotape pass a basketball among themselves, 40% failed to see the woman in a gorilla suit saunter into the middle of the group, turn to the camera, beat her chest, and then walk out (Simons & Chabris, 1999). Second, perception is often biased. Hills are not as steep as they appear to be (Bhalla & Proffitt, 1999; Creem & Proffitt, 1998; Proffitt, Creem, & Zosh, 2001). Distances are not as short as they look (Baird & Biersdorf, 1967; Durgin, Proffitt, Olson, & Reinke, 1995; Gilinsky, 1951; Tittle, Todd, Perotti, & Norman, 1995; Todd & Bressan, 1990; Todd & Norman, 1991). Large objects are not as tall as they seem (Yang, Dixon, & Proffitt, 1999). Everyone knows that the speck of a pebble at the bottom of one’s shoe is never nearly the rock it feels like when one steps on it. Moreover, perception is...

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...data from these five studies also have implications for another enduring issue in psychology. Over the decades, social, personality, clinical, and cognitive psychologists have catalogued a myriad of ways in which people engage in wishful thinking (for reviews, see Baumeister & Newman, 1994; Dunning, 2001; Kunda, 1990; Mele, 1997; Pittman, 1998). However, people remain seemingly unaware that they do all this cognitive work; they remain innocent of the fact that their fears and desires have shaped how they view themselves and think about the world around them (Ehrlinger, Gilovich, & Ross, 2005; Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1998; Mele, 1997; Pronin, Gilovich, & Ross, 2004). Indeed, for people to reach their motivational goals, it is imperative that they remain unaware of the distortions they place on their thinking. If they knew that they believed some pleasant thought merely because they wanted to believe it, they would also know, at least in part, how illegitimate that thought was. How, then, do people pull off the self-deception crucial to the execution of motivated reasoning? Our data provide one answer to this riddle. People fail to recognize such self-serving biases if those processes remain outside of consciou...

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...y in the perceptual process. Emerging evidence, for example, suggests that higher order influences can be detected in V1, the area of the primary visual cortex considered to be the simplest, earliest cortical visual area responsible for processing visual stimuli, which is a mere two synapses away from the eye (Boynton, 2005). For example, when perceivers are asked attend to one of two overlapping orthogonal line patterns, functional magnetic resonance imaging activity patterns in early visual areas, including V1, contain information that can predict what the participant consciously perceives (Kamitani & Tong, 2005). Perceptions of patterns in V1 also occur even if participants are clearly unaware that a pattern has been shown to them (Haynes & Rees, 2005). Implications for Self-Deception The data from these five studies also have implications for another enduring issue in psychology. Over the decades, social, personality, clinical, and cognitive psychologists have catalogued a myriad of ways in which people engage in wishful thinking (for reviews, see Baumeister & Newman, 1994; Dunning, 2001; Kunda, 1990; Mele, 1997; Pittman, 1998). However, people remain seemingly unaware that they do all this cognitiv...

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...sts uniformly agree with the New Look tenet that much of cognition happens nonconsciously, that is, outside a person’s awareness, monitoring, or control (Greenwald, 1992; Wegner & Bargh, 1998). Many modern textbooks describe the New Look proposal that perception is filtered: that the representation of the environment that people have in consciousness has omitted a good deal of information that is actually in the environment (Allport, 1989; Miller, 1987). Similarly, perception of an object is importantly influenced by the perceiver’s expectations as well as the context surrounding that object (Biederman, Mezzanotte, & Rabinowitz, 1982; Boyce & Pollatsek, 1992; Li & Warren, 2004; Long & Toppino, 2004). However, the specific New Look assertion that motivational states influence perception did not achieve the same stature and longevity as these other insights. It, instead, ran aground in the 1950s on the rocky shoals of methodological difficulties and theoretical controversies (Eriksen, 1958, 1962; Eriksen & Browne, 1956; Goldiamond, 1958; Prentice, 1958; Wohlwill, 1966). Critics pointed out that poorer children might misjudge the size of coins because they were not as familiar with them, or that their misjudgments might invo...

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... visual cortex considered to be the simplest, earliest cortical visual area responsible for processing visual stimuli, which is a mere two synapses away from the eye (Boynton, 2005). For example, when perceivers are asked attend to one of two overlapping orthogonal line patterns, functional magnetic resonance imaging activity patterns in early visual areas, including V1, contain information that can predict what the participant consciously perceives (Kamitani & Tong, 2005). Perceptions of patterns in V1 also occur even if participants are clearly unaware that a pattern has been shown to them (Haynes & Rees, 2005). Implications for Self-Deception The data from these five studies also have implications for another enduring issue in psychology. Over the decades, social, personality, clinical, and cognitive psychologists have catalogued a myriad of ways in which people engage in wishful thinking (for reviews, see Baumeister & Newman, 1994; Dunning, 2001; Kunda, 1990; Mele, 1997; Pittman, 1998). However, people remain seemingly unaware that they do all this cognitive work; they remain innocent of the fact that their fears and desires have shaped how they view themselves and think about the world around the...

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...eople fail to recognize such self-serving biases if those processes remain outside of conscious awareness, monitoring, or control. If those processes take place preconsciously, before any content of perception and cognition reaches consciousness, people can construct pleasant thoughts yet remain unaware of the construction. The only content that would be available in consciousness would be the product and not the process of motivated reasoning. There exist some shards of evidence that motivational processes operate on a nonconscious level (e.g., Arndt, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1997; Fein & Spencer, 1997). The present studies enlarge the types of nonconscious processes that motivational states may influence, and it may be profitable to consider other automatic or nonconscious processes that might be molded, in part, by the motivation toward believing in a masterful self in a congenial world. One also wonders about the full range of nonconscious processes that might be tainted by motivational pressures. The world people know is the one they take in through their senses, but it is also formed by other preconscious processes. To what extent is the representation of the world furnished to consciou...

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..., Creem, & Zosh, 2001). Distances are not as short as they look (Baird & Biersdorf, 1967; Durgin, Proffitt, Olson, & Reinke, 1995; Gilinsky, 1951; Tittle, Todd, Perotti, & Norman, 1995; Todd & Bressan, 1990; Todd & Norman, 1991). Large objects are not as tall as they seem (Yang, Dixon, & Proffitt, 1999). Everyone knows that the speck of a pebble at the bottom of one’s shoe is never nearly the rock it feels like when one steps on it. Moreover, perception is malleable. It is responsive to top-down influences that flow from the perceiver’s cognitive and psychological states or from environments (Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999). To be sure, much of perception is bottom-up, with sense organs and perceptual systems working inflexibly and automatically to form a representation of a stimulus that the perceiver passively accepts. The perceptual system pieces together the finegrained bits of information the senses acquire to create a coherent percept, analyzing and synthesizing basic components of objects (Kosslyn & Koenig, 1992; Michelon & Koenig, 2002), including focal areas, critical features (Long & Olszweski, 1999), fixation points (Meng & Tong, 2004; Toppino, 2003), and spatial proximity or crowding (Pelli, Palomare...

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...at match an undesired one. The net effect of focusing on a hypothesis is that the perceiver tends to seek out information that would confirm it rather than disconfirm it (Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1987; Sanitioso, Kunda, & Fong, 1990). Alternatively, a motivated preference might lower the threshold required for the visual system to decide it matches the favored interpretation. Other work in motivated reasoning has shown that information consistent with a favored conclusion is held to a lower standard of scrutiny than information consistent with an unwanted one (Dawson, Gilovich, & Regan, 2002; Ditto & Lopez, 1992; Trope & Ferguson, 2001). It could be then that those features most representative of the desired animal category are recognized faster or more easily because the perceiver requires less of a match between what he or she hopes to see and what is offered by the stimulus. The key to whatever process is at play is that it takes place preconsciously. People are not aware that they have selected one interpretation over another. Indeed, they are not even aware of the alternative interpretation. Whatever work the visual system has done to bias the interpretation that people see involves processes be...

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...etical battle during the New Look period, one that continues to this day. In particular, Bruner and Goodman’s (1947) theory of perceptual defense was criticized by opponents, who asked how a perceiver could selectively defend against a particular stimulus unless the stimulus is already perceived (Eriksen & Browne, 1956; Howie, 1952; Spence, 1967). Critics of Bruner and Goodman (1947) and more recent ones have argued that higher order constraints influence not early perception but rather later stages of the perceptual processes that could be termed postperceptual or perceptual decision making. Pylyshyn (1999), for example, asserted that the act of perceiving an object contains at least two processes. One process, termed early vision works, which is immune to higher order influences, works to provide three-dimensional representations of the surfaces of objects. A later process takes any created representation and then identifies or categorizes it. Pylyshyn (1999) argued that higher 622 BALCETIS AND DUNNING order influences have an impact predominantly on this latter stage.3 However, this assertion is a contentious issue (see the commentaries that accompany Pylyshyn, 1999), and more recent evidence ...

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...ted the recognition of threatening stimuli, such as troubling words (Postman, Bruner, & McGinnies, 1948). These initial demonstrations of motivational influences on perception were met with much enthusiasm, which was then followed by withering criticism. To be sure, much of what the New Look theorists proposed has lasted through today and informs contemporary cognitive and perceptual psychology in fundamental ways. Psychologists uniformly agree with the New Look tenet that much of cognition happens nonconsciously, that is, outside a person’s awareness, monitoring, or control (Greenwald, 1992; Wegner & Bargh, 1998). Many modern textbooks describe the New Look proposal that perception is filtered: that the representation of the environment that people have in consciousness has omitted a good deal of information that is actually in the environment (Allport, 1989; Miller, 1987). Similarly, perception of an object is importantly influenced by the perceiver’s expectations as well as the context surrounding that object (Biederman, Mezzanotte, & Rabinowitz, 1982; Boyce & Pollatsek, 1992; Li & Warren, 2004; Long & Toppino, 2004). However, the specific New Look assertion that motivational states influence percep...

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...be sure, much of what the New Look theorists proposed has lasted through today and informs contemporary cognitive and perceptual psychology in fundamental ways. Psychologists uniformly agree with the New Look tenet that much of cognition happens nonconsciously, that is, outside a person’s awareness, monitoring, or control (Greenwald, 1992; Wegner & Bargh, 1998). Many modern textbooks describe the New Look proposal that perception is filtered: that the representation of the environment that people have in consciousness has omitted a good deal of information that is actually in the environment (Allport, 1989; Miller, 1987). Similarly, perception of an object is importantly influenced by the perceiver’s expectations as well as the context surrounding that object (Biederman, Mezzanotte, & Rabinowitz, 1982; Boyce & Pollatsek, 1992; Li & Warren, 2004; Long & Toppino, 2004). However, the specific New Look assertion that motivational states influence perception did not achieve the same stature and longevity as these other insights. It, instead, ran aground in the 1950s on the rocky shoals of methodological difficulties and theoretical controversies (Eriksen, 1958, 1962; Eriksen & Browne, 1956; Goldiamo...

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...gest an enhanced perceptual sensitivity for features in visual stimuli that are relevant to biological drives or desires. But would a drive toward wishful thinking similarly influence perception? In a sense, this question is a revisiting and a reopening of one of the focal issues of the New Look approach to perception that arose in psychology during the 1940s and 1950s (Bruner & Minturn, 1955). According to New Look theorists, perception was an active and constructive process influenced by many top-down factors. One class of such factors was the needs and values of the perceiver. For example, Bruner and Goodman (1947) asked children in diverse social economic conditions to estimate the size of monetary coins by manipulating the diameter of a beam of light. Poorer children, for whom the value of money was greater, overestimated the size of the coins compared with more affluent children, who were presumed to place less value on the same coins. In studies of perceptual defense, New Look theorists concluded that participants inhibited the recognition of threatening stimuli, such as troubling words (Postman, Bruner, & McGinnies, 1948). These initial demonstrations of motivational influences on perception were m...

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...aying them (Erdelyi, 1974, 1985). Others lamented that the relative unfamiliarity of threatening words, and not their motivational punch, was the key ingredient that slowed participants’ recognition responses (Adkins, 1956; Howes & Solomon, 1950). As such, the influence of motivational states on perception was never firmly established. And as the 1950s closed the study of the relation between motivational states and perception, this pursuit fell by the wayside and ceased to have the major impact—if any at all—enjoyed by other insights from the New Look tradition (Dunning, 2001; Erdelyi, 1974; Gilbert, 1998; Jones, 1985; Nisbett & Ross, 1980). Perception of Ambiguous Figures In the present research, we examined the impact of motivational states on perception by focusing on interpretations of ambiguous or reversible figures—visual stimuli, like the famous Necker cube, that people can interpret in two different ways but for which they tend to see only one interpretation at any given time (Long & Toppino, 2004; Rock & Mitchener, 1992). In each of five studies, we told participants that they were about to be assigned to one of two experimental tasks, one being much more desirable than the other. We ...

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...e see or hear is an exact replica of what is out in the world, in two different ways. First, perception is selective. People are not aware of everything that is going on around them. Consider, for example, recent studies of attentional blindness. Of undergraduates asked to monitor how many times people in a videotape pass a basketball among themselves, 40% failed to see the woman in a gorilla suit saunter into the middle of the group, turn to the camera, beat her chest, and then walk out (Simons & Chabris, 1999). Second, perception is often biased. Hills are not as steep as they appear to be (Bhalla & Proffitt, 1999; Creem & Proffitt, 1998; Proffitt, Creem, & Zosh, 2001). Distances are not as short as they look (Baird & Biersdorf, 1967; Durgin, Proffitt, Olson, & Reinke, 1995; Gilinsky, 1951; Tittle, Todd, Perotti, & Norman, 1995; Todd & Bressan, 1990; Todd & Norman, 1991). Large objects are not as tall as they seem (Yang, Dixon, & Proffitt, 1999). Everyone knows that the speck of a pebble at the bottom of one’s shoe is never nearly the rock it feels like when one steps on it. Moreover, perception is malleable. It is responsive to top-down influences that flow from the perceiver’s cognitive and psycholog...

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...texts can suggest a testable perceptual hypothesis, a preference or desire might privilege a favored interpretation or hypothesis over a disfavored one. Wishful thinking might shape the specific hypothesis that individuals test when given such ambiguous information. In particular, the perceiver might scan the visual stimulus in a biased manner, searching for features that match those of the desired animal rather than those that match an undesired one. The net effect of focusing on a hypothesis is that the perceiver tends to seek out information that would confirm it rather than disconfirm it (Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1987; Sanitioso, Kunda, & Fong, 1990). Alternatively, a motivated preference might lower the threshold required for the visual system to decide it matches the favored interpretation. Other work in motivated reasoning has shown that information consistent with a favored conclusion is held to a lower standard of scrutiny than information consistent with an unwanted one (Dawson, Gilovich, & Regan, 2002; Ditto & Lopez, 1992; Trope & Ferguson, 2001). It could be then that those features most representative of the desired animal category are recognized faster or more easily because the perceiver require...

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...ke when one steps on it. Moreover, perception is malleable. It is responsive to top-down influences that flow from the perceiver’s cognitive and psychological states or from environments (Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999). To be sure, much of perception is bottom-up, with sense organs and perceptual systems working inflexibly and automatically to form a representation of a stimulus that the perceiver passively accepts. The perceptual system pieces together the finegrained bits of information the senses acquire to create a coherent percept, analyzing and synthesizing basic components of objects (Kosslyn & Koenig, 1992; Michelon & Koenig, 2002), including focal areas, critical features (Long & Olszweski, 1999), fixation points (Meng & Tong, 2004; Toppino, 2003), and spatial proximity or crowding (Pelli, Palomares, & Majaj, 2004). But a substantial volume of psychological research reveals that top-down influences also inform perception. For example, context matters. Prior exposure to images of animals or people biases what people see when they view classic ambiguous figures, such as the rat–man and old woman–young woman figures so often featured in introductory psychology textbooks (Bugelski & Alampay, 1961;...

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...ingworth, 1999). To be sure, much of perception is bottom-up, with sense organs and perceptual systems working inflexibly and automatically to form a representation of a stimulus that the perceiver passively accepts. The perceptual system pieces together the finegrained bits of information the senses acquire to create a coherent percept, analyzing and synthesizing basic components of objects (Kosslyn & Koenig, 1992; Michelon & Koenig, 2002), including focal areas, critical features (Long & Olszweski, 1999), fixation points (Meng & Tong, 2004; Toppino, 2003), and spatial proximity or crowding (Pelli, Palomares, & Majaj, 2004). But a substantial volume of psychological research reveals that top-down influences also inform perception. For example, context matters. Prior exposure to images of animals or people biases what people see when they view classic ambiguous figures, such as the rat–man and old woman–young woman figures so often featured in introductory psychology textbooks (Bugelski & Alampay, 1961; Leeper, 1935). Estimates of a man’s walking speed are biased after thinking about fast animals like cheetahs or slow animals like turtles (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2002). Interpretations of an ambiguous figure that ...

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...Leeper, 1935). Estimates of a man’s walking speed are biased after thinking about fast animals like cheetahs or slow animals like turtles (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2002). Interpretations of an ambiguous figure that can be seen as a woman’s face or as a man playing a saxophone depend on whether perceivers have been recently primed with the concepts of “flirtation” or “music” (Balcetis & Dale, 2003). Perceptions of how steep a hill is become more extreme after participants jog vigorously for an hour (Bhalla & Proffitt, 1999). The distance to a goal seems longer if people strap on a heavy backpack (Proffitt, Stefanucci, Banton, & Epstein, 2003). In the current article, we explore one possible top-down influence on perception that has been shown to have a profound and ubiquitous impact in other arenas of social cognition. That influence is the perceiver’s motivational states—more specifically, the motivation to think of one’s self and one’s prospects in a favorable way, to believe that one will achieve positive outcomes while Emily Balcetis and David Dunning, Department of Psychology, Cornell University. This research was supported financially by National Institute of Mental Health Grant RO1 56072 awarded to David Dunning. We thank ...

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...terpretation they had seen—if they knew the measure was being taken at all. As was the case in the previous studies, we asked participants to provide a verbal or written report of whether they had seen a horse or a seal after being shown a figure that could be interpreted as either. However, in addition, we also measured participants’ eye movements to see if they would give clues as to how participants had interpreted the figure. Recent evidence suggests that initial eye movements on presentation of a stimulus are not influenced by conscious processing (Allopenna, Magnuson, & Tanenhaus, 1998; Richardson & Spivey, 2000; Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995). Thus, we examined whether the first saccade (eye movement) after presentation of the ambiguous figure would be to a label on the computer screen marked “farm animal” or one marked “sea creature.” We expected that such saccades would indicate that participants had interpreted the figure in a way that placed them in a favorable circumstance. Method Participants. Participants were 79 undergraduates at Cornell University completing the study in exchange for extra credit. Procedure. Participants came into the lab alone and were seated approxi...

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...rceptual hypothesis, a preference or desire might privilege a favored interpretation or hypothesis over a disfavored one. Wishful thinking might shape the specific hypothesis that individuals test when given such ambiguous information. In particular, the perceiver might scan the visual stimulus in a biased manner, searching for features that match those of the desired animal rather than those that match an undesired one. The net effect of focusing on a hypothesis is that the perceiver tends to seek out information that would confirm it rather than disconfirm it (Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1987; Sanitioso, Kunda, & Fong, 1990). Alternatively, a motivated preference might lower the threshold required for the visual system to decide it matches the favored interpretation. Other work in motivated reasoning has shown that information consistent with a favored conclusion is held to a lower standard of scrutiny than information consistent with an unwanted one (Dawson, Gilovich, & Regan, 2002; Ditto & Lopez, 1992; Trope & Ferguson, 2001). It could be then that those features most representative of the desired animal category are recognized faster or more easily because the perceiver requires less of a match between what h...

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...rticipants inhibited the recognition of threatening stimuli, such as troubling words (Postman, Bruner, & McGinnies, 1948). These initial demonstrations of motivational influences on perception were met with much enthusiasm, which was then followed by withering criticism. To be sure, much of what the New Look theorists proposed has lasted through today and informs contemporary cognitive and perceptual psychology in fundamental ways. Psychologists uniformly agree with the New Look tenet that much of cognition happens nonconsciously, that is, outside a person’s awareness, monitoring, or control (Greenwald, 1992; Wegner & Bargh, 1998). Many modern textbooks describe the New Look proposal that perception is filtered: that the representation of the environment that people have in consciousness has omitted a good deal of information that is actually in the environment (Allport, 1989; Miller, 1987). Similarly, perception of an object is importantly influenced by the perceiver’s expectations as well as the context surrounding that object (Biederman, Mezzanotte, & Rabinowitz, 1982; Boyce & Pollatsek, 1992; Li & Warren, 2004; Long & Toppino, 2004). However, the specific New Look assertion that motivational ...

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...ies (Eriksen, 1958, 1962; Eriksen & Browne, 1956; Goldiamond, 1958; Prentice, 1958; Wohlwill, 1966). Critics pointed out that poorer children might misjudge the size of coins because they were not as familiar with them, or that their misjudgments might involve problems of memory rather than perception (McCurdy, 1956). Critics also noted in studies of perceptual defense that participants might have taken longer to report troubling words not because it took them longer to perceive them but rather because it took longer to get over the surprise of seeing them or the embarrassment of saying them (Erdelyi, 1974, 1985). Others lamented that the relative unfamiliarity of threatening words, and not their motivational punch, was the key ingredient that slowed participants’ recognition responses (Adkins, 1956; Howes & Solomon, 1950). As such, the influence of motivational states on perception was never firmly established. And as the 1950s closed the study of the relation between motivational states and perception, this pursuit fell by the wayside and ceased to have the major impact—if any at all—enjoyed by other insights from the New Look tradition (Dunning, 2001; Erdelyi, 1974; Gilbert, 1998; Jones, 198...

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...asked to monitor how many times people in a videotape pass a basketball among themselves, 40% failed to see the woman in a gorilla suit saunter into the middle of the group, turn to the camera, beat her chest, and then walk out (Simons & Chabris, 1999). Second, perception is often biased. Hills are not as steep as they appear to be (Bhalla & Proffitt, 1999; Creem & Proffitt, 1998; Proffitt, Creem, & Zosh, 2001). Distances are not as short as they look (Baird & Biersdorf, 1967; Durgin, Proffitt, Olson, & Reinke, 1995; Gilinsky, 1951; Tittle, Todd, Perotti, & Norman, 1995; Todd & Bressan, 1990; Todd & Norman, 1991). Large objects are not as tall as they seem (Yang, Dixon, & Proffitt, 1999). Everyone knows that the speck of a pebble at the bottom of one’s shoe is never nearly the rock it feels like when one steps on it. Moreover, perception is malleable. It is responsive to top-down influences that flow from the perceiver’s cognitive and psychological states or from environments (Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999). To be sure, much of perception is bottom-up, with sense organs and perceptual systems working inflexibly and automatically to form a representation of a stimulus that the perceiver passively acce...

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...nitive and psychological states or from environments (Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999). To be sure, much of perception is bottom-up, with sense organs and perceptual systems working inflexibly and automatically to form a representation of a stimulus that the perceiver passively accepts. The perceptual system pieces together the finegrained bits of information the senses acquire to create a coherent percept, analyzing and synthesizing basic components of objects (Kosslyn & Koenig, 1992; Michelon & Koenig, 2002), including focal areas, critical features (Long & Olszweski, 1999), fixation points (Meng & Tong, 2004; Toppino, 2003), and spatial proximity or crowding (Pelli, Palomares, & Majaj, 2004). But a substantial volume of psychological research reveals that top-down influences also inform perception. For example, context matters. Prior exposure to images of animals or people biases what people see when they view classic ambiguous figures, such as the rat–man and old woman–young woman figures so often featured in introductory psychology textbooks (Bugelski & Alampay, 1961; Leeper, 1935). Estimates of a man’s walking speed are biased after thinking about fast animals like cheetahs or slow animals lik...

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...der, for example, recent studies of attentional blindness. Of undergraduates asked to monitor how many times people in a videotape pass a basketball among themselves, 40% failed to see the woman in a gorilla suit saunter into the middle of the group, turn to the camera, beat her chest, and then walk out (Simons & Chabris, 1999). Second, perception is often biased. Hills are not as steep as they appear to be (Bhalla & Proffitt, 1999; Creem & Proffitt, 1998; Proffitt, Creem, & Zosh, 2001). Distances are not as short as they look (Baird & Biersdorf, 1967; Durgin, Proffitt, Olson, & Reinke, 1995; Gilinsky, 1951; Tittle, Todd, Perotti, & Norman, 1995; Todd & Bressan, 1990; Todd & Norman, 1991). Large objects are not as tall as they seem (Yang, Dixon, & Proffitt, 1999). Everyone knows that the speck of a pebble at the bottom of one’s shoe is never nearly the rock it feels like when one steps on it. Moreover, perception is malleable. It is responsive to top-down influences that flow from the perceiver’s cognitive and psychological states or from environments (Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999). To be sure, much of perception is bottom-up, with sense organs and perceptual systems working inflexibly and aut...

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...ss. Of undergraduates asked to monitor how many times people in a videotape pass a basketball among themselves, 40% failed to see the woman in a gorilla suit saunter into the middle of the group, turn to the camera, beat her chest, and then walk out (Simons & Chabris, 1999). Second, perception is often biased. Hills are not as steep as they appear to be (Bhalla & Proffitt, 1999; Creem & Proffitt, 1998; Proffitt, Creem, & Zosh, 2001). Distances are not as short as they look (Baird & Biersdorf, 1967; Durgin, Proffitt, Olson, & Reinke, 1995; Gilinsky, 1951; Tittle, Todd, Perotti, & Norman, 1995; Todd & Bressan, 1990; Todd & Norman, 1991). Large objects are not as tall as they seem (Yang, Dixon, & Proffitt, 1999). Everyone knows that the speck of a pebble at the bottom of one’s shoe is never nearly the rock it feels like when one steps on it. Moreover, perception is malleable. It is responsive to top-down influences that flow from the perceiver’s cognitive and psychological states or from environments (Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999). To be sure, much of perception is bottom-up, with sense organs and perceptual systems working inflexibly and automatically to form a representation of a stimulus that the pe...

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...g? Our data provide one answer to this riddle. People fail to recognize such self-serving biases if those processes remain outside of conscious awareness, monitoring, or control. If those processes take place preconsciously, before any content of perception and cognition reaches consciousness, people can construct pleasant thoughts yet remain unaware of the construction. The only content that would be available in consciousness would be the product and not the process of motivated reasoning. There exist some shards of evidence that motivational processes operate on a nonconscious level (e.g., Arndt, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1997; Fein & Spencer, 1997). The present studies enlarge the types of nonconscious processes that motivational states may influence, and it may be profitable to consider other automatic or nonconscious processes that might be molded, in part, by the motivation toward believing in a masterful self in a congenial world. One also wonders about the full range of nonconscious processes that might be tainted by motivational pressures. The world people know is the one they take in through their senses, but it is also formed by other preconscious processes. To what extent is the representation of the worl...

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...ly, that is, outside a person’s awareness, monitoring, or control (Greenwald, 1992; Wegner & Bargh, 1998). Many modern textbooks describe the New Look proposal that perception is filtered: that the representation of the environment that people have in consciousness has omitted a good deal of information that is actually in the environment (Allport, 1989; Miller, 1987). Similarly, perception of an object is importantly influenced by the perceiver’s expectations as well as the context surrounding that object (Biederman, Mezzanotte, & Rabinowitz, 1982; Boyce & Pollatsek, 1992; Li & Warren, 2004; Long & Toppino, 2004). However, the specific New Look assertion that motivational states influence perception did not achieve the same stature and longevity as these other insights. It, instead, ran aground in the 1950s on the rocky shoals of methodological difficulties and theoretical controversies (Eriksen, 1958, 1962; Eriksen & Browne, 1956; Goldiamond, 1958; Prentice, 1958; Wohlwill, 1966). Critics pointed out that poorer children might misjudge the size of coins because they were not as familiar with them, or that their misjudgments might involve problems of memory rather than perception (McCurdy, 1956). Crit...

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...elyi, 1974, 1985). Others lamented that the relative unfamiliarity of threatening words, and not their motivational punch, was the key ingredient that slowed participants’ recognition responses (Adkins, 1956; Howes & Solomon, 1950). As such, the influence of motivational states on perception was never firmly established. And as the 1950s closed the study of the relation between motivational states and perception, this pursuit fell by the wayside and ceased to have the major impact—if any at all—enjoyed by other insights from the New Look tradition (Dunning, 2001; Erdelyi, 1974; Gilbert, 1998; Jones, 1985; Nisbett & Ross, 1980). Perception of Ambiguous Figures In the present research, we examined the impact of motivational states on perception by focusing on interpretations of ambiguous or reversible figures—visual stimuli, like the famous Necker cube, that people can interpret in two different ways but for which they tend to see only one interpretation at any given time (Long & Toppino, 2004; Rock & Mitchener, 1992). In each of five studies, we told participants that they were about to be assigned to one of two experimental tasks, one being much more desirable than the other. We also told par...

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...4.91.4.612 612 being able to avoid aversive ones, and to enhance self-worth and esteem. This motivation in the psychological literature has several names, such as motivated reasoning, self-affirmation, wishful thinking, and defensive processing, and has been shown to have a widespread influence in shaping how people think about their world, that is, how they interpret information of which they are consciously aware. This motive has been shown to influence such higher order tasks as judging other people, evaluating the self, predicting the future, and making sense of the past (for reviews, see Baumeister & Newman, 1994; Dunning, 2001; Kunda, 1990; Pittman, 1998). In the studies that follow, we examine the scope of motivated reasoning to see if it crosses the boundary between how people think about their outside world and how they perceive it. Certainly, motivated reasoning influences conscious, deliberate, and effortful judgments, but we ask if it can constrain what information reaches consciousness in the first place. Does the impact of motivated reasoning or wishful thinking, more specifically, extend down to preconscious processing of visual information? We test, in essence, whether people literally are ...

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...o enhance self-worth and esteem. This motivation in the psychological literature has several names, such as motivated reasoning, self-affirmation, wishful thinking, and defensive processing, and has been shown to have a widespread influence in shaping how people think about their world, that is, how they interpret information of which they are consciously aware. This motive has been shown to influence such higher order tasks as judging other people, evaluating the self, predicting the future, and making sense of the past (for reviews, see Baumeister & Newman, 1994; Dunning, 2001; Kunda, 1990; Pittman, 1998). In the studies that follow, we examine the scope of motivated reasoning to see if it crosses the boundary between how people think about their outside world and how they perceive it. Certainly, motivated reasoning influences conscious, deliberate, and effortful judgments, but we ask if it can constrain what information reaches consciousness in the first place. Does the impact of motivated reasoning or wishful thinking, more specifically, extend down to preconscious processing of visual information? We test, in essence, whether people literally are prone to see what they want to see. The Impa...

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...ain information that can predict what the participant consciously perceives (Kamitani & Tong, 2005). Perceptions of patterns in V1 also occur even if participants are clearly unaware that a pattern has been shown to them (Haynes & Rees, 2005). Implications for Self-Deception The data from these five studies also have implications for another enduring issue in psychology. Over the decades, social, personality, clinical, and cognitive psychologists have catalogued a myriad of ways in which people engage in wishful thinking (for reviews, see Baumeister & Newman, 1994; Dunning, 2001; Kunda, 1990; Mele, 1997; Pittman, 1998). However, people remain seemingly unaware that they do all this cognitive work; they remain innocent of the fact that their fears and desires have shaped how they view themselves and think about the world around them (Ehrlinger, Gilovich, & Ross, 2005; Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1998; Mele, 1997; Pronin, Gilovich, & Ross, 2004). Indeed, for people to reach their motivational goals, it is imperative that they remain unaware of the distortions they place on their thinking. If they knew that they believed some pleasant thought merely because they wanted to beli...

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..., recent studies of attentional blindness. Of undergraduates asked to monitor how many times people in a videotape pass a basketball among themselves, 40% failed to see the woman in a gorilla suit saunter into the middle of the group, turn to the camera, beat her chest, and then walk out (Simons & Chabris, 1999). Second, perception is often biased. Hills are not as steep as they appear to be (Bhalla & Proffitt, 1999; Creem & Proffitt, 1998; Proffitt, Creem, & Zosh, 2001). Distances are not as short as they look (Baird & Biersdorf, 1967; Durgin, Proffitt, Olson, & Reinke, 1995; Gilinsky, 1951; Tittle, Todd, Perotti, & Norman, 1995; Todd & Bressan, 1990; Todd & Norman, 1991). Large objects are not as tall as they seem (Yang, Dixon, & Proffitt, 1999). Everyone knows that the speck of a pebble at the bottom of one’s shoe is never nearly the rock it feels like when one steps on it. Moreover, perception is malleable. It is responsive to top-down influences that flow from the perceiver’s cognitive and psychological states or from environments (Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999). To be sure, much of perception is bottom-up, with sense organs and perceptual systems working inflexibly and automatically to form a representation of ...

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... replica of what is out in the world, in two different ways. First, perception is selective. People are not aware of everything that is going on around them. Consider, for example, recent studies of attentional blindness. Of undergraduates asked to monitor how many times people in a videotape pass a basketball among themselves, 40% failed to see the woman in a gorilla suit saunter into the middle of the group, turn to the camera, beat her chest, and then walk out (Simons & Chabris, 1999). Second, perception is often biased. Hills are not as steep as they appear to be (Bhalla & Proffitt, 1999; Creem & Proffitt, 1998; Proffitt, Creem, & Zosh, 2001). Distances are not as short as they look (Baird & Biersdorf, 1967; Durgin, Proffitt, Olson, & Reinke, 1995; Gilinsky, 1951; Tittle, Todd, Perotti, & Norman, 1995; Todd & Bressan, 1990; Todd & Norman, 1991). Large objects are not as tall as they seem (Yang, Dixon, & Proffitt, 1999). Everyone knows that the speck of a pebble at the bottom of one’s shoe is never nearly the rock it feels like when one steps on it. Moreover, perception is malleable. It is responsive to top-down influences that flow from the perceiver’s cognitive and psychological states or from envi...

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...ing wishful thinking have an impact on visual perception. Recent work focusing on more biologically oriented motivational states shows that they influence the perception of visual stimuli. For example, Changizi and Hall (2001) demonstrated that participants who were thirsty perceived more transparency in ambiguous visual stimuli than did those who were not thirsty, presumably because transparency is a characteristic associated with water. Women during periods of high fertility were faster to categorize male photographs than female ones by gender, relative to those not in such a fertile state (Macrae, Alnwick, Milne, & Schloerscheidt, 2002). It is important that the same comparative enhancement was not present for women taking a contraceptive pill or those who were pregnant (Johnston, Arden, Macrae, & Grace, 2003). Both of these examples suggest an enhanced perceptual sensitivity for features in visual stimuli that are relevant to biological drives or desires. But would a drive toward wishful thinking similarly influence perception? In a sense, this question is a revisiting and a reopening of one of the focal issues of the New Look approach to perception that arose in psychology during the 1940s and 1950s (Bruner & Minturn, 195...

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... that much of cognition happens nonconsciously, that is, outside a person’s awareness, monitoring, or control (Greenwald, 1992; Wegner & Bargh, 1998). Many modern textbooks describe the New Look proposal that perception is filtered: that the representation of the environment that people have in consciousness has omitted a good deal of information that is actually in the environment (Allport, 1989; Miller, 1987). Similarly, perception of an object is importantly influenced by the perceiver’s expectations as well as the context surrounding that object (Biederman, Mezzanotte, & Rabinowitz, 1982; Boyce & Pollatsek, 1992; Li & Warren, 2004; Long & Toppino, 2004). However, the specific New Look assertion that motivational states influence perception did not achieve the same stature and longevity as these other insights. It, instead, ran aground in the 1950s on the rocky shoals of methodological difficulties and theoretical controversies (Eriksen, 1958, 1962; Eriksen & Browne, 1956; Goldiamond, 1958; Prentice, 1958; Wohlwill, 1966). Critics pointed out that poorer children might misjudge the size of coins because they were not as familiar with them, or that their misjudgments might involve problems of memory ra...

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...iefing, some indicated disbelief that the performance evaluation component of the experiment would take place. Again, these people were unable to explain the purpose of the study. Thus, no participant was excluded for either of these reasons. Explicit reports. Omitting the one participant who did not offer an interpretation, we calculated the proportion of participants who had reported seeing a horse in each cell in a 2 (desired animal type: farm or sea) 2 (task order: LDT before or after figure) design. Performing arcsin transforms on these proportions by means of the procedure outlined by Langer and Abelson (1972), allowed us to assess all main effects and interactions inherent in the design. This analysis indicated that desire facilitated the disambiguation of the figure. Whether or not participants saw a horse or a seal depended on whether participants were motivated to see farm animals or sea animals (z 4.15, p .001). No other effects were significant. When hoping to see farm animals, 97.2% (n 69) of participants saw the figure as a horse, and 2.8% (n 2) saw a seal. However, the pattern changed when participants hoped to see sea creatures. That is, 76.0% (n 73) of this group saw a horse, 2...

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...f what the New Look theorists proposed has lasted through today and informs contemporary cognitive and perceptual psychology in fundamental ways. Psychologists uniformly agree with the New Look tenet that much of cognition happens nonconsciously, that is, outside a person’s awareness, monitoring, or control (Greenwald, 1992; Wegner & Bargh, 1998). Many modern textbooks describe the New Look proposal that perception is filtered: that the representation of the environment that people have in consciousness has omitted a good deal of information that is actually in the environment (Allport, 1989; Miller, 1987). Similarly, perception of an object is importantly influenced by the perceiver’s expectations as well as the context surrounding that object (Biederman, Mezzanotte, & Rabinowitz, 1982; Boyce & Pollatsek, 1992; Li & Warren, 2004; Long & Toppino, 2004). However, the specific New Look assertion that motivational states influence perception did not achieve the same stature and longevity as these other insights. It, instead, ran aground in the 1950s on the rocky shoals of methodological difficulties and theoretical controversies (Eriksen, 1958, 1962; Eriksen & Browne, 1956; Goldiamond, 1958; Prent...

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...mplications for Self-Deception The data from these five studies also have implications for another enduring issue in psychology. Over the decades, social, personality, clinical, and cognitive psychologists have catalogued a myriad of ways in which people engage in wishful thinking (for reviews, see Baumeister & Newman, 1994; Dunning, 2001; Kunda, 1990; Mele, 1997; Pittman, 1998). However, people remain seemingly unaware that they do all this cognitive work; they remain innocent of the fact that their fears and desires have shaped how they view themselves and think about the world around them (Ehrlinger, Gilovich, & Ross, 2005; Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1998; Mele, 1997; Pronin, Gilovich, & Ross, 2004). Indeed, for people to reach their motivational goals, it is imperative that they remain unaware of the distortions they place on their thinking. If they knew that they believed some pleasant thought merely because they wanted to believe it, they would also know, at least in part, how illegitimate that thought was. How, then, do people pull off the self-deception crucial to the execution of motivated reasoning? Our data provide one answer to this riddle. People fail to recognize such self-serving ...

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...gical states or from environments (Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999). To be sure, much of perception is bottom-up, with sense organs and perceptual systems working inflexibly and automatically to form a representation of a stimulus that the perceiver passively accepts. The perceptual system pieces together the finegrained bits of information the senses acquire to create a coherent percept, analyzing and synthesizing basic components of objects (Kosslyn & Koenig, 1992; Michelon & Koenig, 2002), including focal areas, critical features (Long & Olszweski, 1999), fixation points (Meng & Tong, 2004; Toppino, 2003), and spatial proximity or crowding (Pelli, Palomares, & Majaj, 2004). But a substantial volume of psychological research reveals that top-down influences also inform perception. For example, context matters. Prior exposure to images of animals or people biases what people see when they view classic ambiguous figures, such as the rat–man and old woman–young woman figures so often featured in introductory psychology textbooks (Bugelski & Alampay, 1961; Leeper, 1935). Estimates of a man’s walking speed are biased after thinking about fast animals like cheetahs or slow animals like turtles (Aarts...

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...tors. One class of such factors was the needs and values of the perceiver. For example, Bruner and Goodman (1947) asked children in diverse social economic conditions to estimate the size of monetary coins by manipulating the diameter of a beam of light. Poorer children, for whom the value of money was greater, overestimated the size of the coins compared with more affluent children, who were presumed to place less value on the same coins. In studies of perceptual defense, New Look theorists concluded that participants inhibited the recognition of threatening stimuli, such as troubling words (Postman, Bruner, & McGinnies, 1948). These initial demonstrations of motivational influences on perception were met with much enthusiasm, which was then followed by withering criticism. To be sure, much of what the New Look theorists proposed has lasted through today and informs contemporary cognitive and perceptual psychology in fundamental ways. Psychologists uniformly agree with the New Look tenet that much of cognition happens nonconsciously, that is, outside a person’s awareness, monitoring, or control (Greenwald, 1992; Wegner & Bargh, 1998). Many modern textbooks describe the New Look proposal that perception is filtered...

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... Schloerscheidt, 2002). It is important that the same comparative enhancement was not present for women taking a contraceptive pill or those who were pregnant (Johnston, Arden, Macrae, & Grace, 2003). Both of these examples suggest an enhanced perceptual sensitivity for features in visual stimuli that are relevant to biological drives or desires. But would a drive toward wishful thinking similarly influence perception? In a sense, this question is a revisiting and a reopening of one of the focal issues of the New Look approach to perception that arose in psychology during the 1940s and 1950s (Bruner & Minturn, 1955). According to New Look theorists, perception was an active and constructive process influenced by many top-down factors. One class of such factors was the needs and values of the perceiver. For example, Bruner and Goodman (1947) asked children in diverse social economic conditions to estimate the size of monetary coins by manipulating the diameter of a beam of light. Poorer children, for whom the value of money was greater, overestimated the size of the coins compared with more affluent children, who were presumed to place less value on the same coins. In studies of perceptual defense, New Lo...

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...o avoid aversive ones, and to enhance self-worth and esteem. This motivation in the psychological literature has several names, such as motivated reasoning, self-affirmation, wishful thinking, and defensive processing, and has been shown to have a widespread influence in shaping how people think about their world, that is, how they interpret information of which they are consciously aware. This motive has been shown to influence such higher order tasks as judging other people, evaluating the self, predicting the future, and making sense of the past (for reviews, see Baumeister & Newman, 1994; Dunning, 2001; Kunda, 1990; Pittman, 1998). In the studies that follow, we examine the scope of motivated reasoning to see if it crosses the boundary between how people think about their outside world and how they perceive it. Certainly, motivated reasoning influences conscious, deliberate, and effortful judgments, but we ask if it can constrain what information reaches consciousness in the first place. Does the impact of motivated reasoning or wishful thinking, more specifically, extend down to preconscious processing of visual information? We test, in essence, whether people literally are prone to see wh...

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... Michelon & Koenig, 2002), including focal areas, critical features (Long & Olszweski, 1999), fixation points (Meng & Tong, 2004; Toppino, 2003), and spatial proximity or crowding (Pelli, Palomares, & Majaj, 2004). But a substantial volume of psychological research reveals that top-down influences also inform perception. For example, context matters. Prior exposure to images of animals or people biases what people see when they view classic ambiguous figures, such as the rat–man and old woman–young woman figures so often featured in introductory psychology textbooks (Bugelski & Alampay, 1961; Leeper, 1935). Estimates of a man’s walking speed are biased after thinking about fast animals like cheetahs or slow animals like turtles (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2002). Interpretations of an ambiguous figure that can be seen as a woman’s face or as a man playing a saxophone depend on whether perceivers have been recently primed with the concepts of “flirtation” or “music” (Balcetis & Dale, 2003). Perceptions of how steep a hill is become more extreme after participants jog vigorously for an hour (Bhalla & Proffitt, 1999). The distance to a goal seems longer if people strap on a heavy backpack (Proffitt, Ste...

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...le are not aware of everything that is going on around them. Consider, for example, recent studies of attentional blindness. Of undergraduates asked to monitor how many times people in a videotape pass a basketball among themselves, 40% failed to see the woman in a gorilla suit saunter into the middle of the group, turn to the camera, beat her chest, and then walk out (Simons & Chabris, 1999). Second, perception is often biased. Hills are not as steep as they appear to be (Bhalla & Proffitt, 1999; Creem & Proffitt, 1998; Proffitt, Creem, & Zosh, 2001). Distances are not as short as they look (Baird & Biersdorf, 1967; Durgin, Proffitt, Olson, & Reinke, 1995; Gilinsky, 1951; Tittle, Todd, Perotti, & Norman, 1995; Todd & Bressan, 1990; Todd & Norman, 1991). Large objects are not as tall as they seem (Yang, Dixon, & Proffitt, 1999). Everyone knows that the speck of a pebble at the bottom of one’s shoe is never nearly the rock it feels like when one steps on it. Moreover, perception is malleable. It is responsive to top-down influences that flow from the perceiver’s cognitive and psychological states or from environments (Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999). To be sure, much of perception is bottom-up, with sense...

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...s (Kosslyn & Koenig, 1992; Michelon & Koenig, 2002), including focal areas, critical features (Long & Olszweski, 1999), fixation points (Meng & Tong, 2004; Toppino, 2003), and spatial proximity or crowding (Pelli, Palomares, & Majaj, 2004). But a substantial volume of psychological research reveals that top-down influences also inform perception. For example, context matters. Prior exposure to images of animals or people biases what people see when they view classic ambiguous figures, such as the rat–man and old woman–young woman figures so often featured in introductory psychology textbooks (Bugelski & Alampay, 1961; Leeper, 1935). Estimates of a man’s walking speed are biased after thinking about fast animals like cheetahs or slow animals like turtles (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2002). Interpretations of an ambiguous figure that can be seen as a woman’s face or as a man playing a saxophone depend on whether perceivers have been recently primed with the concepts of “flirtation” or “music” (Balcetis & Dale, 2003). Perceptions of how steep a hill is become more extreme after participants jog vigorously for an hour (Bhalla & Proffitt, 1999). The distance to a goal seems longer if people strap on a heavy backpack...

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...ception, this pursuit fell by the wayside and ceased to have the major impact—if any at all—enjoyed by other insights from the New Look tradition (Dunning, 2001; Erdelyi, 1974; Gilbert, 1998; Jones, 1985; Nisbett & Ross, 1980). Perception of Ambiguous Figures In the present research, we examined the impact of motivational states on perception by focusing on interpretations of ambiguous or reversible figures—visual stimuli, like the famous Necker cube, that people can interpret in two different ways but for which they tend to see only one interpretation at any given time (Long & Toppino, 2004; Rock & Mitchener, 1992). In each of five studies, we told participants that they were about to be assigned to one of two experimental tasks, one being much more desirable than the other. We also told participants that a computer sitting in front of them was about to present them a stimulus that would indicate which task they were assigned to. In fact, in each study, the computer presented a figure that could be interpreted in two different ways: one way that would assign participants to their favored task and one that would assign them to the opposite. We expected that participants would tend to see the interpretati...

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...2003), and spatial proximity or crowding (Pelli, Palomares, & Majaj, 2004). But a substantial volume of psychological research reveals that top-down influences also inform perception. For example, context matters. Prior exposure to images of animals or people biases what people see when they view classic ambiguous figures, such as the rat–man and old woman–young woman figures so often featured in introductory psychology textbooks (Bugelski & Alampay, 1961; Leeper, 1935). Estimates of a man’s walking speed are biased after thinking about fast animals like cheetahs or slow animals like turtles (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2002). Interpretations of an ambiguous figure that can be seen as a woman’s face or as a man playing a saxophone depend on whether perceivers have been recently primed with the concepts of “flirtation” or “music” (Balcetis & Dale, 2003). Perceptions of how steep a hill is become more extreme after participants jog vigorously for an hour (Bhalla & Proffitt, 1999). The distance to a goal seems longer if people strap on a heavy backpack (Proffitt, Stefanucci, Banton, & Epstein, 2003). In the current article, we explore one possible top-down influence on perception that has been shown to have a profoun...

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...thing that is going on around them. Consider, for example, recent studies of attentional blindness. Of undergraduates asked to monitor how many times people in a videotape pass a basketball among themselves, 40% failed to see the woman in a gorilla suit saunter into the middle of the group, turn to the camera, beat her chest, and then walk out (Simons & Chabris, 1999). Second, perception is often biased. Hills are not as steep as they appear to be (Bhalla & Proffitt, 1999; Creem & Proffitt, 1998; Proffitt, Creem, & Zosh, 2001). Distances are not as short as they look (Baird & Biersdorf, 1967; Durgin, Proffitt, Olson, & Reinke, 1995; Gilinsky, 1951; Tittle, Todd, Perotti, & Norman, 1995; Todd & Bressan, 1990; Todd & Norman, 1991). Large objects are not as tall as they seem (Yang, Dixon, & Proffitt, 1999). Everyone knows that the speck of a pebble at the bottom of one’s shoe is never nearly the rock it feels like when one steps on it. Moreover, perception is malleable. It is responsive to top-down influences that flow from the perceiver’s cognitive and psychological states or from environments (Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999). To be sure, much of perception is bottom-up, with sense organs and perceptual systems working in...

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...on that is actually in the environment (Allport, 1989; Miller, 1987). Similarly, perception of an object is importantly influenced by the perceiver’s expectations as well as the context surrounding that object (Biederman, Mezzanotte, & Rabinowitz, 1982; Boyce & Pollatsek, 1992; Li & Warren, 2004; Long & Toppino, 2004). However, the specific New Look assertion that motivational states influence perception did not achieve the same stature and longevity as these other insights. It, instead, ran aground in the 1950s on the rocky shoals of methodological difficulties and theoretical controversies (Eriksen, 1958, 1962; Eriksen & Browne, 1956; Goldiamond, 1958; Prentice, 1958; Wohlwill, 1966). Critics pointed out that poorer children might misjudge the size of coins because they were not as familiar with them, or that their misjudgments might involve problems of memory rather than perception (McCurdy, 1956). Critics also noted in studies of perceptual defense that participants might have taken longer to report troubling words not because it took them longer to perceive them but rather because it took longer to get over the surprise of seeing them or the embarrassment of saying them (Erdelyi, 1974, 198...

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...li. For example, Changizi and Hall (2001) demonstrated that participants who were thirsty perceived more transparency in ambiguous visual stimuli than did those who were not thirsty, presumably because transparency is a characteristic associated with water. Women during periods of high fertility were faster to categorize male photographs than female ones by gender, relative to those not in such a fertile state (Macrae, Alnwick, Milne, & Schloerscheidt, 2002). It is important that the same comparative enhancement was not present for women taking a contraceptive pill or those who were pregnant (Johnston, Arden, Macrae, & Grace, 2003). Both of these examples suggest an enhanced perceptual sensitivity for features in visual stimuli that are relevant to biological drives or desires. But would a drive toward wishful thinking similarly influence perception? In a sense, this question is a revisiting and a reopening of one of the focal issues of the New Look approach to perception that arose in psychology during the 1940s and 1950s (Bruner & Minturn, 1955). According to New Look theorists, perception was an active and constructive process influenced by many top-down factors. One class of such factors was the needs and values of...

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...NNING order influences have an impact predominantly on this latter stage.3 However, this assertion is a contentious issue (see the commentaries that accompany Pylyshyn, 1999), and more recent evidence suggests that higher order processes can impose their influence on perception very early in the perceptual process. Emerging evidence, for example, suggests that higher order influences can be detected in V1, the area of the primary visual cortex considered to be the simplest, earliest cortical visual area responsible for processing visual stimuli, which is a mere two synapses away from the eye (Boynton, 2005). For example, when perceivers are asked attend to one of two overlapping orthogonal line patterns, functional magnetic resonance imaging activity patterns in early visual areas, including V1, contain information that can predict what the participant consciously perceives (Kamitani & Tong, 2005). Perceptions of patterns in V1 also occur even if participants are clearly unaware that a pattern has been shown to them (Haynes & Rees, 2005). Implications for Self-Deception The data from these five studies also have implications for another enduring issue in psychology. Over the decades, social, per...

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...k if it can constrain what information reaches consciousness in the first place. Does the impact of motivated reasoning or wishful thinking, more specifically, extend down to preconscious processing of visual information? We test, in essence, whether people literally are prone to see what they want to see. The Impact of Motivational States There exist some indirect hints that the motives underlying wishful thinking have an impact on visual perception. Recent work focusing on more biologically oriented motivational states shows that they influence the perception of visual stimuli. For example, Changizi and Hall (2001) demonstrated that participants who were thirsty perceived more transparency in ambiguous visual stimuli than did those who were not thirsty, presumably because transparency is a characteristic associated with water. Women during periods of high fertility were faster to categorize male photographs than female ones by gender, relative to those not in such a fertile state (Macrae, Alnwick, Milne, & Schloerscheidt, 2002). It is important that the same comparative enhancement was not present for women taking a contraceptive pill or those who were pregnant (Johnston, Arden, Macrae, & Grace, 2003). ...

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...rt, 1989; Miller, 1987). Similarly, perception of an object is importantly influenced by the perceiver’s expectations as well as the context surrounding that object (Biederman, Mezzanotte, & Rabinowitz, 1982; Boyce & Pollatsek, 1992; Li & Warren, 2004; Long & Toppino, 2004). However, the specific New Look assertion that motivational states influence perception did not achieve the same stature and longevity as these other insights. It, instead, ran aground in the 1950s on the rocky shoals of methodological difficulties and theoretical controversies (Eriksen, 1958, 1962; Eriksen & Browne, 1956; Goldiamond, 1958; Prentice, 1958; Wohlwill, 1966). Critics pointed out that poorer children might misjudge the size of coins because they were not as familiar with them, or that their misjudgments might involve problems of memory rather than perception (McCurdy, 1956). Critics also noted in studies of perceptual defense that participants might have taken longer to report troubling words not because it took them longer to perceive them but rather because it took longer to get over the surprise of seeing them or the embarrassment of saying them (Erdelyi, 1974, 1985). Others lamented that the relative unfamiliar...

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...appens nonconsciously, that is, outside a person’s awareness, monitoring, or control (Greenwald, 1992; Wegner & Bargh, 1998). Many modern textbooks describe the New Look proposal that perception is filtered: that the representation of the environment that people have in consciousness has omitted a good deal of information that is actually in the environment (Allport, 1989; Miller, 1987). Similarly, perception of an object is importantly influenced by the perceiver’s expectations as well as the context surrounding that object (Biederman, Mezzanotte, & Rabinowitz, 1982; Boyce & Pollatsek, 1992; Li & Warren, 2004; Long & Toppino, 2004). However, the specific New Look assertion that motivational states influence perception did not achieve the same stature and longevity as these other insights. It, instead, ran aground in the 1950s on the rocky shoals of methodological difficulties and theoretical controversies (Eriksen, 1958, 1962; Eriksen & Browne, 1956; Goldiamond, 1958; Prentice, 1958; Wohlwill, 1966). Critics pointed out that poorer children might misjudge the size of coins because they were not as familiar with them, or that their misjudgments might involve problems of memory rather than perceptio...

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...luences that flow from the perceiver’s cognitive and psychological states or from environments (Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999). To be sure, much of perception is bottom-up, with sense organs and perceptual systems working inflexibly and automatically to form a representation of a stimulus that the perceiver passively accepts. The perceptual system pieces together the finegrained bits of information the senses acquire to create a coherent percept, analyzing and synthesizing basic components of objects (Kosslyn & Koenig, 1992; Michelon & Koenig, 2002), including focal areas, critical features (Long & Olszweski, 1999), fixation points (Meng & Tong, 2004; Toppino, 2003), and spatial proximity or crowding (Pelli, Palomares, & Majaj, 2004). But a substantial volume of psychological research reveals that top-down influences also inform perception. For example, context matters. Prior exposure to images of animals or people biases what people see when they view classic ambiguous figures, such as the rat–man and old woman–young woman figures so often featured in introductory psychology textbooks (Bugelski & Alampay, 1961; Leeper, 1935). Estimates of a man’s walking speed are biased after thinking about fast anima...

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...tball among themselves, 40% failed to see the woman in a gorilla suit saunter into the middle of the group, turn to the camera, beat her chest, and then walk out (Simons & Chabris, 1999). Second, perception is often biased. Hills are not as steep as they appear to be (Bhalla & Proffitt, 1999; Creem & Proffitt, 1998; Proffitt, Creem, & Zosh, 2001). Distances are not as short as they look (Baird & Biersdorf, 1967; Durgin, Proffitt, Olson, & Reinke, 1995; Gilinsky, 1951; Tittle, Todd, Perotti, & Norman, 1995; Todd & Bressan, 1990; Todd & Norman, 1991). Large objects are not as tall as they seem (Yang, Dixon, & Proffitt, 1999). Everyone knows that the speck of a pebble at the bottom of one’s shoe is never nearly the rock it feels like when one steps on it. Moreover, perception is malleable. It is responsive to top-down influences that flow from the perceiver’s cognitive and psychological states or from environments (Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999). To be sure, much of perception is bottom-up, with sense organs and perceptual systems working inflexibly and automatically to form a representation of a stimulus that the perceiver passively accepts. The perceptual system pieces together the finegrained bits of informat...

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...n the environment (Allport, 1989; Miller, 1987). Similarly, perception of an object is importantly influenced by the perceiver’s expectations as well as the context surrounding that object (Biederman, Mezzanotte, & Rabinowitz, 1982; Boyce & Pollatsek, 1992; Li & Warren, 2004; Long & Toppino, 2004). However, the specific New Look assertion that motivational states influence perception did not achieve the same stature and longevity as these other insights. It, instead, ran aground in the 1950s on the rocky shoals of methodological difficulties and theoretical controversies (Eriksen, 1958, 1962; Eriksen & Browne, 1956; Goldiamond, 1958; Prentice, 1958; Wohlwill, 1966). Critics pointed out that poorer children might misjudge the size of coins because they were not as familiar with them, or that their misjudgments might involve problems of memory rather than perception (McCurdy, 1956). Critics also noted in studies of perceptual defense that participants might have taken longer to report troubling words not because it took them longer to perceive them but rather because it took longer to get over the surprise of seeing them or the embarrassment of saying them (Erdelyi, 1974, 1985). Others lamented that the r...

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...ong & Toppino, 2004). However, the specific New Look assertion that motivational states influence perception did not achieve the same stature and longevity as these other insights. It, instead, ran aground in the 1950s on the rocky shoals of methodological difficulties and theoretical controversies (Eriksen, 1958, 1962; Eriksen & Browne, 1956; Goldiamond, 1958; Prentice, 1958; Wohlwill, 1966). Critics pointed out that poorer children might misjudge the size of coins because they were not as familiar with them, or that their misjudgments might involve problems of memory rather than perception (McCurdy, 1956). Critics also noted in studies of perceptual defense that participants might have taken longer to report troubling words not because it took them longer to perceive them but rather because it took longer to get over the surprise of seeing them or the embarrassment of saying them (Erdelyi, 1974, 1985). Others lamented that the relative unfamiliarity of threatening words, and not their motivational punch, was the key ingredient that slowed participants’ recognition responses (Adkins, 1956; Howes & Solomon, 1950). As such, the influence of motivational states on perception was never firmly estab...

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...h them, or that their misjudgments might involve problems of memory rather than perception (McCurdy, 1956). Critics also noted in studies of perceptual defense that participants might have taken longer to report troubling words not because it took them longer to perceive them but rather because it took longer to get over the surprise of seeing them or the embarrassment of saying them (Erdelyi, 1974, 1985). Others lamented that the relative unfamiliarity of threatening words, and not their motivational punch, was the key ingredient that slowed participants’ recognition responses (Adkins, 1956; Howes & Solomon, 1950). As such, the influence of motivational states on perception was never firmly established. And as the 1950s closed the study of the relation between motivational states and perception, this pursuit fell by the wayside and ceased to have the major impact—if any at all—enjoyed by other insights from the New Look tradition (Dunning, 2001; Erdelyi, 1974; Gilbert, 1998; Jones, 1985; Nisbett & Ross, 1980). Perception of Ambiguous Figures In the present research, we examined the impact of motivational states on perception by focusing on interpretations of ambiguous or reversible figures—visual stimu...

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...ea animals, 2(1, N 59) 9.90, p .002. We should note that scores on our eye-tracking measure significantly correlated with the score participants received from their explicit reports (Spearman’s .42, p .001). Study 4: Converging Evidence from Lexical Decision Data Study 4 served as a conceptual replication of Study 3 but used a different type of indirect measure of perception. A good deal of research (e.g., Neely, 1991) suggests that a picture of an object serves as a prime for concepts associated with that object, even if people are not aware that they have seen the object (e.g., Loach & Mari-Beffa, 2003; Raymond, Shapiro, & Arnell, 1992). Thus, in Study 3, we motivated participants to interpret an ambiguous figure as either a horse or a seal. Participants again provided an explicit report of the interpretation they saw. However, we also collected reaction time data to gain an additional measure of whether participants had specifically seen the interpretation they had reported—and only that interpretation. Just after viewing the figure, participants completed a lexical decision task (LDT) in which they were presented with letter strings and had to decide whether those letter strings formed En...

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... Moreover, perception is malleable. It is responsive to top-down influences that flow from the perceiver’s cognitive and psychological states or from environments (Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999). To be sure, much of perception is bottom-up, with sense organs and perceptual systems working inflexibly and automatically to form a representation of a stimulus that the perceiver passively accepts. The perceptual system pieces together the finegrained bits of information the senses acquire to create a coherent percept, analyzing and synthesizing basic components of objects (Kosslyn & Koenig, 1992; Michelon & Koenig, 2002), including focal areas, critical features (Long & Olszweski, 1999), fixation points (Meng & Tong, 2004; Toppino, 2003), and spatial proximity or crowding (Pelli, Palomares, & Majaj, 2004). But a substantial volume of psychological research reveals that top-down influences also inform perception. For example, context matters. Prior exposure to images of animals or people biases what people see when they view classic ambiguous figures, such as the rat–man and old woman–young woman figures so often featured in introductory psychology textbooks (Bugelski & Alampay, 1961; Leeper, 1935). Estimates ...

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...in the world, in two different ways. First, perception is selective. People are not aware of everything that is going on around them. Consider, for example, recent studies of attentional blindness. Of undergraduates asked to monitor how many times people in a videotape pass a basketball among themselves, 40% failed to see the woman in a gorilla suit saunter into the middle of the group, turn to the camera, beat her chest, and then walk out (Simons & Chabris, 1999). Second, perception is often biased. Hills are not as steep as they appear to be (Bhalla & Proffitt, 1999; Creem & Proffitt, 1998; Proffitt, Creem, & Zosh, 2001). Distances are not as short as they look (Baird & Biersdorf, 1967; Durgin, Proffitt, Olson, & Reinke, 1995; Gilinsky, 1951; Tittle, Todd, Perotti, & Norman, 1995; Todd & Bressan, 1990; Todd & Norman, 1991). Large objects are not as tall as they seem (Yang, Dixon, & Proffitt, 1999). Everyone knows that the speck of a pebble at the bottom of one’s shoe is never nearly the rock it feels like when one steps on it. Moreover, perception is malleable. It is responsive to top-down influences that flow from the perceiver’s cognitive and psychological states or from environments (Henderson & Hollingwo...

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...er more suggestive that participants would consume the canned beans. Ongoing scores at the end of the penultimate round were such that only one animal was worth enough positive points to be able to pull participants from the negative and bring a positive final score, thus avoiding the canned beans. For half of the participants, this animal was a horse; for the other half, it was a seal. The animal displayed during the final trial was in fact an ambiguous figure (2.75 in. wide, 3.75 in. tall) that could be interpreted as either the head of a horse or the full body of a seal (see Figure 2; from Fisher, 1968). All animals, including the last figure, remained on the screen for 1,000 ms. After the game, participants completed a funneled debriefing that probed for suspicion of the purpose of the study, possible alternate interpretations of the figure, and asked if they had seen the figure before. Results Given the criteria we established a priori, 5 participants were excluded for articulating the purpose of the study and 4 for mathematical errors that precluded them from desiring the target animal. No one reported seeing both interpretations of the ambiguous figure. These omissions left data from 43 ...

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...ssigned to. In fact, in each study, the computer presented a figure that could be interpreted in two different ways: one way that would assign participants to their favored task and one that would assign them to the opposite. We expected that participants would tend to see the interpretation that assigned them to the outcome they favored. 613MOTIVATIONAL INFLUENCES ON VISUAL PERCEPTION Because our experimental stimuli, like much of the contents of our surroundings, lack clarity and contain multiple interpretations, potential interpretations of a visual stimulus can be likened to a hypothesis (Gregory, 1974). Given a constrained set of bottom-up features and top-down influences, the perceptual system considers certain ideas of what an ambiguous stimulus might be and ultimately selects one interpretation. For example, given the distinct features of a four-legged shape in a distant field, one can entertain different hypotheses about the identity of the shape. For example, to test whether the shape is a cow, the perceiver might examine whether the shape has a stocky snout and black spots. Just as expectancies and contexts can suggest a testable perceptual hypothesis, a preference or desire might pri...

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...s familiar with them, or that their misjudgments might involve problems of memory rather than perception (McCurdy, 1956). Critics also noted in studies of perceptual defense that participants might have taken longer to report troubling words not because it took them longer to perceive them but rather because it took longer to get over the surprise of seeing them or the embarrassment of saying them (Erdelyi, 1974, 1985). Others lamented that the relative unfamiliarity of threatening words, and not their motivational punch, was the key ingredient that slowed participants’ recognition responses (Adkins, 1956; Howes & Solomon, 1950). As such, the influence of motivational states on perception was never firmly established. And as the 1950s closed the study of the relation between motivational states and perception, this pursuit fell by the wayside and ceased to have the major impact—if any at all—enjoyed by other insights from the New Look tradition (Dunning, 2001; Erdelyi, 1974; Gilbert, 1998; Jones, 1985; Nisbett & Ross, 1980). Perception of Ambiguous Figures In the present research, we examined the impact of motivational states on perception by focusing on interpretations of ambiguous or reversi...

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...se for whom sea animals would have been the most valuable, 2(1, N 40) 0.11, p .74. When farm animals were the most valuable, 65% (n 13) of participants saw the figure as a horse, and 35% (n 7) saw it as a seal. When sea creatures were the most valuable, 70% (n 14) saw the figure as a horse, and 30% (n 6) saw it as a seal. The results of this study can be compared with those of Study 2 to suggest that reducing desire to see a particular animal can reduce the bias in interpretations. Because we are making comparisons across studies, it is necessary to use a Stouffer’s Z test (see Darlington & Hayes, 2000, for a review) to test if the effect of desire in Study 2 is sufficiently different from the effect of desire in this control study. That turns out to be the case (Z 2.58, p .005). Study 3: Adding an Unobtrusive Measure Study 3 was designed to provide convergent evidence that the interpretations participants reported were, indeed, the sole interpretations that came to consciousness as they viewed the ambiguous stimulus. One can propose, instead, that participants saw both interpretations and then simply chose the one to tell the experimenter that placed them in a happier circumstance. One...

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...e work. Is the impact of motivation limited to later stages of perception, such as categorization, or does its influence extend to earlier and more primitive tasks the perceptual system faces (e.g., noticing lines and edges in a visual scene)? This question became a major theoretical battle during the New Look period, one that continues to this day. In particular, Bruner and Goodman’s (1947) theory of perceptual defense was criticized by opponents, who asked how a perceiver could selectively defend against a particular stimulus unless the stimulus is already perceived (Eriksen & Browne, 1956; Howie, 1952; Spence, 1967). Critics of Bruner and Goodman (1947) and more recent ones have argued that higher order constraints influence not early perception but rather later stages of the perceptual processes that could be termed postperceptual or perceptual decision making. Pylyshyn (1999), for example, asserted that the act of perceiving an object contains at least two processes. One process, termed early vision works, which is immune to higher order influences, works to provide three-dimensional representations of the surfaces of objects. A later process takes any created representation and then ide...

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..., perception of an object is importantly influenced by the perceiver’s expectations as well as the context surrounding that object (Biederman, Mezzanotte, & Rabinowitz, 1982; Boyce & Pollatsek, 1992; Li & Warren, 2004; Long & Toppino, 2004). However, the specific New Look assertion that motivational states influence perception did not achieve the same stature and longevity as these other insights. It, instead, ran aground in the 1950s on the rocky shoals of methodological difficulties and theoretical controversies (Eriksen, 1958, 1962; Eriksen & Browne, 1956; Goldiamond, 1958; Prentice, 1958; Wohlwill, 1966). Critics pointed out that poorer children might misjudge the size of coins because they were not as familiar with them, or that their misjudgments might involve problems of memory rather than perception (McCurdy, 1956). Critics also noted in studies of perceptual defense that participants might have taken longer to report troubling words not because it took them longer to perceive them but rather because it took longer to get over the surprise of seeing them or the embarrassment of saying them (Erdelyi, 1974, 1985). Others lamented that the relative unfamiliarity of threatening words, and not...

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...es of animals or people biases what people see when they view classic ambiguous figures, such as the rat–man and old woman–young woman figures so often featured in introductory psychology textbooks (Bugelski & Alampay, 1961; Leeper, 1935). Estimates of a man’s walking speed are biased after thinking about fast animals like cheetahs or slow animals like turtles (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2002). Interpretations of an ambiguous figure that can be seen as a woman’s face or as a man playing a saxophone depend on whether perceivers have been recently primed with the concepts of “flirtation” or “music” (Balcetis & Dale, 2003). Perceptions of how steep a hill is become more extreme after participants jog vigorously for an hour (Bhalla & Proffitt, 1999). The distance to a goal seems longer if people strap on a heavy backpack (Proffitt, Stefanucci, Banton, & Epstein, 2003). In the current article, we explore one possible top-down influence on perception that has been shown to have a profound and ubiquitous impact in other arenas of social cognition. That influence is the perceiver’s motivational states—more specifically, the motivation to think of one’s self and one’s prospects in a favorable way, to believe that one...

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...e impact of motivation limited to later stages of perception, such as categorization, or does its influence extend to earlier and more primitive tasks the perceptual system faces (e.g., noticing lines and edges in a visual scene)? This question became a major theoretical battle during the New Look period, one that continues to this day. In particular, Bruner and Goodman’s (1947) theory of perceptual defense was criticized by opponents, who asked how a perceiver could selectively defend against a particular stimulus unless the stimulus is already perceived (Eriksen & Browne, 1956; Howie, 1952; Spence, 1967). Critics of Bruner and Goodman (1947) and more recent ones have argued that higher order constraints influence not early perception but rather later stages of the perceptual processes that could be termed postperceptual or perceptual decision making. Pylyshyn (1999), for example, asserted that the act of perceiving an object contains at least two processes. One process, termed early vision works, which is immune to higher order influences, works to provide three-dimensional representations of the surfaces of objects. A later process takes any created representation and then identifies or cate...

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... one. The net effect of focusing on a hypothesis is that the perceiver tends to seek out information that would confirm it rather than disconfirm it (Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1987; Sanitioso, Kunda, & Fong, 1990). Alternatively, a motivated preference might lower the threshold required for the visual system to decide it matches the favored interpretation. Other work in motivated reasoning has shown that information consistent with a favored conclusion is held to a lower standard of scrutiny than information consistent with an unwanted one (Dawson, Gilovich, & Regan, 2002; Ditto & Lopez, 1992; Trope & Ferguson, 2001). It could be then that those features most representative of the desired animal category are recognized faster or more easily because the perceiver requires less of a match between what he or she hopes to see and what is offered by the stimulus. The key to whatever process is at play is that it takes place preconsciously. People are not aware that they have selected one interpretation over another. Indeed, they are not even aware of the alternative interpretation. Whatever work the visual system has done to bias the interpretation that people see involves processes below the level of awarenes...