title: Buddha as an Eye Opener: A Link between Prosocial Attitude and Attentional Control.
abstract: Increasing evidence suggests that religious practice induces systematic biases in attentional control. We used Navon's global-local task to compare attentional bias in Taiwanese Zen Buddhists and Taiwanese atheists; two groups brought up in the same country and culture and matched with respect to race, intelligence, sex, and age. Given the Buddhist emphasis on compassion for the physical and social environment, we expected a more global bias in Buddhist than in Atheist participants. In line with these expectations, Buddhists showed a larger global-precedence effect and increased interference from global distracters when processing local information. This pattern reinforces the idea that people's attentional processing style reflects biases rewarded by their religious practices.
authors.affiliation: 1Cognitive Psychology Unit and Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University Leiden, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Lorenza S
authors.initials: LS
authors.lastname: Colzato
authors.forename: Bernhard
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Hommel
authors.forename: Wery P M
authors.initials: WP
authors.lastname: van den Wildenberg
authors.forename: Shulan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Hsieh