Individual Differences in Motivated Response and Visual Perception

Leong and colleagues (2019) found two dissociable biases in motivated perception: a bias in sensory perception and a bias in a person's reports of what they perceive. Prior research on motivated perception have noted that individuals differ in how susceptible they are to motivated perception (Leong et al., 2019), but they have not examined why these differences exist. The goal of the current study was to assess the relationship between personality traits (i.e. anxiety, depression, impulsiveness and paranoia) and the level of bias towards what a participant is motivated to see. A merged face-scene image task was presented to participants, with a forced-choice between the image as more face-dominant or more scene-dominant. Participants were motivated towards face-dominant images for 4 of 12 blocks, scene-dominant for 12 blocks, and neutral or no motivation for 4 blocks. Survey measures were collected for each participant personality trait. Linear regressions, Drift Diffusion Modeling (DDM), t tests, and psychometric modeling were used to analyze data. Results showed that participants are more likely to see what they are motivated to see, but individual difference findings were not significant. This is likely due to the small sample size, and future research should explore this topic further.