Having an open-minded personality manifests at a basic level of visual perception

By Christian Jarrett Openness to Experience is one of the so-called Big Five personality traits and, among other things, it’s associated with being more creative, curious and appreciative of the arts. Like all the traits, where you score has important implications – for instance, there’s recent evidence that being more Open is associated with having more “cognitive reserve”, which gives you protection from the harmful effects of dementia. Openness correlates with, but is distinct from, intelligence, and psychologists are trying to find out more about what the basis of Openness is at a cognitive and neural level. A new paper in Journal of Research in Personality shows that the trait runs deep, even affecting a very basic aspect of visual perception. It seems Open people literally see the world differently. Anna Antinori and her colleagues asked 134 undergrad students to perform a binocular rivalry task, which involves two different images being presented separately to each eye. The brain usually deals with this clash by alternately suppressing the images, which leads to the subjective experience of seeing one image then the other, back and forth. Occasionally, the perception of the two images can meld together and the researchers were interested in whether this experience correlates with the personality trait of Openness. That’s exactly what they found. They presented their participants with a red striped pattern to one eye and a green pat...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Cognition Perception Personality Source Type: blogs