Corentin Clément-Guillotin

Evidence of Motivational Influences in Early Visual Perception Hunger Modulates Conscious Access

The New Look approach to perception (Bruner, 1957) posits that perception is a constructive process based on several topdown factors, such as individuals’ expectations, needs, and desires. Many classical experiments from the New Look era have provided striking illustrations of the effect of motivation on perception. For example, they have revealed that poor children have a bias to overrate coin size (Bruner & Goodman, 1947) and that hungry people have a bias to overrate the brightness of pictures of food (Gilchrist & Nesberg, 1952). This line of research has not gone without criticisms (e.g., Erdelyi, 1974; McCurdy, 1956), but recent experiments have largely confirmed its validity (Aarts, Dijksterhuis, & De Vries, 2001; Balcetis & Dunning, 2006, 2010). Despite the evidence of an effect of motivation on perception, it is still unknown at which point in the perceptual process motivational influences occur. Visual perception is generally regarded as a serial process that starts with a purely perceptual stage (i.e., early vision), in which features are extracted in visual processing areas of the brain. Early vision is followed by a postperceptual, decision stage, in which the perceptual output is categorized. Top-down influences were traditionally thought to bias only the decision stage, and early vision was described as cognitively impenetrable (e.g., Pylyshyn, 1999; Riesenhuber & Poggio, 2000). However, consistent with the idea that higher-level representations can shape the perceptual stage by a tuning process that influences which features are selected for processing (Schyns, Goldstone, & Thibaut, 1998), recent studies have revealed the existence of top-down influences on perceptual processing (e.g., influences of attention—Carrasco, Ling, & Read, 2004—and conceptual category—Lupyan, Thompson-Schill, & Swingley, 2010). Here, we report a study in which we aimed to test whether motivation can also penetrate and guide early visual processing. All previous research on the effect of motivation on perception has employed clearly visible stimuli: In most of these studies, researchers simply observed how ambiguous stimuli were interpreted. In contrast, in this experiment, we monitored conscious access to masked visual stimuli. This enabled us to focus on the early perceptual encoding stage that occurs unconsciously. Inspired by the method used by Gaillard et al. (2006), we presented words close to the threshold of conscious perception. We expected that participants who had fasted (and were therefore motivated by food) would be more likely than satiated participants to perceive masked food-related words.

Can exercise change the stereotypes associated with individuals with cancer

The purpose of this study was to examine whether exercising can positively influence the stereotypes associated with individuals with cancer and, more specifically, have an effect on the impression formation related to warmth and competence. A total of 193 French college students (Mage = 21.08, SD = 1.44 years; 88 females and 105 males) were randomly assigned to one of the conditions of a 2 (participant sex) × 2 (target health status: cancer vs no information) × 3 (target exercise status: exerciser vs non‐exerciser vs no information) experimental design. Results indicated that exercising target with cancer was perceived as the most competent compared with targets with cancer and those without information about cancer. These results suggest that exercising could be an effective way to undermine cancer stereotypes and reduce discrimination against people with cancer.

Implicit and explicit stereotype content associated with people with physical disability: Does sport change anything?

Objectives: This article examines whether sports practice can influence the stereotype content associated with people with physical disability from the viewpoint of people without disability. Design: Both implicit and explicit stereotypes were assessed for people with disability compared with people without disability (Study 1), people with disability who engage in sport compared with people without disability (Study 2), and people with disability who engage in sport compared with people with disability (Study 3). Method: Participants (NStudy1 = 57, NStudy 2 = 61, NStudy 3 = 63) performed a warmth‐Implicit Association Test and a competence‐Implicit Association Test and were asked to rate how strongly they associated a series of warmth and competence traits with one or the other group of people. Results: In Study 1, people with disability were implicitly associated with less positivity and explicitly associated with higher warmth but lower competence than people without disability. The same results were found in Study 2. In Study 3, people with disability who engage in sport were explicitly associated with higher warmth and competence than people with disability but this result failed to emerge at an implicit level. Conclusions: The influence of practicing sport on the stereotype content associated with people with physical disability seems less consistent than has been assumed thus far. The results suggest the need for further study of the implicit stereotype content concerning people with disability and the types of information that might weaken the link between disability and negativity. HighlightsExamining how sports information on stereotypes about disability is proposed.Doing sport for people with disability is a strategy to change explicit stereotypes.Sports participation has no influence on the implicit negative stereotypes.

If you are old and do not want to fall into the traditional stereotype-be physically active!

Background/Study Context: Based on the stereotype content model and the behaviors from intergroup affect and stereotypes map (Cuddy et al., 2008; Advances in experimental social psychology [Vol. 40, pp. 61–149], New York: Academic Press), we examined whether being physically active may challenge the traditional stereotypes related to older adults. Methods: We compared how 94 participants (Mage = 24.48 years, SD = 7.15 years) judged one of three target groups (older adults in general, physically active older adults, and socially active older adults), with regard to perceived status and competition, warmth and competence judgments, emotional and behavioral reactions. Results: Results showed that being physically active was associated with higher status and competence. Physically active older adults were specifically viewed as an admired group eliciting both active (helping) and passive facilitation (associating) tendencies. Conclusion: Beyond the well-known health perspective related to the regular participation of older adults in physical activity, the present results open a social optimistic perspective, in which being physically active seems a promising way to challenge the widespread and resistant stereotype content of older people commonly perpetuated.