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Updated: Jun 28, 2026

Modulation of the Neurophysiological Response to Fearful and Stressful Stimuli Through Repetitive Religious Chanting
Published on: November 4, 2021
Losing the big picture: how religion may control visual attention
Lorenza S Colzato1, Wery P M van den Wildenberg, Bernhard Hommel
1Leiden University, Cognitive Psychology Unit & Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden, The Netherlands. colzato@fsw.leidenuniv.nl
Abstract:
Despite the abundance of evidence that human perception is penetrated by beliefs and expectations, scientific research so far has entirely neglected the possible impact of religious background on attention. Here we show that Dutch Calvinists and atheists, brought up in the same country and culture and controlled for race, intelligence, sex, and age, differ with respect to the way they attend to and process the global and local features of complex visual stimuli: Calvinists attend less to global aspects of perceived events, which fits with the idea that people's attentional processing style reflects possible biases rewarded by their religious belief system.
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