User:Megs61/sandbox

As we have discussed, some background and history of how our perception is influenced by the context that surrounds us became a topic of interest of topic can be expanded on and included. The examples provided for Wishful Thinking are vague and could use clearer examples, such as how the size of a coin differed for a child in a poor economic situation relative to a boy in a good economic situation. It could also use more primary sources and a more focused theme, specifically wishful thinking in psychology.

This article could benefit from including how desires and preferences not only influence thinking, but also visual processing. In Dunning & Balcetis (2013), they specifically address the term coined wishful thinking or the influence of preferences on perception of an objects categorization and representation .As well as the way personal contexts, such as cultural background or physical fitness, can influence the way emotion and the environment is perceived.

However, I also believe it is important to address both the biological and cognitive mechanisms underlying wishful thinking and seeing. A study has found neural correlates to wishful thinking in the reward system of the central nervous system. Furthermore, these activated regions of the brain have provided clues to the possible lower-cognitive level processing that takes place during wishful thinking. This could lead into a segway to look at the studies that address cognitive mechanisms, such as selective attention, that have been used to explain biases in perceptions and expectations.

Although attention can lead to enhanced perceptual processing, the lack of attention to stimuli can also lead to a perceived enhanced perception of the stimuli. Participants were pre-cued that indicated the diagonal to which they should be attending. They were then presented with stimuli (gratings with different textures) and then a response cue that indicated the diagonal for which the participants had to judge their perception. 70% of the time the response cue matched the pre-cue and 30% of the time did not match the pre-cue. The participants were asked to report texture of the gratings that appeared in the response-cue and discriminate its visibility. This set-up allowed them to compare the perception of attended (cued) and non-attended stimuli (uncued). Higher visibility was reported for stimuli that was unattended. Therefore, inattention lead to an overestimation of perception sensitivity. This study suggests attention bias, a mechanism of wishful thinking, does not only rely on what individuals fixate upon, but the unattended stimuli as well.

Mechanisms
Concrete mechanisms underlying wishful thinking and wishful seeing are unknown. Since these concepts are still developing, research on the mechanisms contributing to this phenomenon is still in progress. However, some mechanisms have been proposed. Wishful thinking could be attributed to three mechanisms: attention bias, interpretation bias or response bias. Therefore, there are three different stages in cognitive processing in which wishful thinking could arise. First, at the lowest stage of cognitive processing, individuals selectively attend to cues. Therefore, individuals attending to evidence that support their desires and neglecting contradictory evidence. Second, wishful thinking could be generated by selective interpretation of cues. In this case, an individual is not changing the attention to cues but the attribution of importance to the cue. Finally, wishful thinking can arise at a higher stage of cognitive processing, such as when forming a response to the cue and inserting bias.

Wishful seeing could be attributed to the same mechanisms as wishful thinking because it involves the processing of situational cues, which includes visual cues. However, with preconscious processing of visual cues and their associations with desirable outcomes, interpretation bias and response bias are not plausible since they occur in conscious cognitive processing stages. Therefore, a fourth mechanism called perceptual set can also explain this phenomenon. This mechanism proposes that mental states or associations activated before an object comes into view subtly guide the visual system during processing. Therefore, cues are readily recognized when they are related to such a mental state or association.

Neural Circuitry
The areas of the brain that motivate wishful seeing and thinking are associated with the same regions that underlie social identification and reward. A study looked at these structures using MRI while participants estimated the winning probabilities for a series of football teams. Prior to this estimation, the individuals specified their favorite, neutral and least favorite NFL teams. Wishful thinking has been associated with social identity theory where individual seem to prefer in-group members over out-group members. In this case, these individuals preferred the football team they most identified.

During wishful thinking tasks, differential activity was found in three areas of the brain: dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, the parietal lobe, and the fusiform gyrus in the occipital lobe. Differential activity in the occipital and parietal areas suggests a mode of selective attention to the cues presented; therefore, supporting a lower-level cognitive processing or attention bias. However, differential activity in the prefrontal cortex also suggests higher-cognitive processing. The prefrontal cortex activity is related to preferences involved in social identification. As a result, when cues are relevant to an individual, such as a favorite football team, the prefrontal cortex is activated. This identification of self carries hedonic value which in turn stimulates the reward system. Differential activation of the reward system areas was only seen in conjunction with the activation of occipital lobe. Thus, the activation of the reward system with an identification of self could lead to guidance of visual attention.

Representation of emotion
Emotion is often interpreted through visual cues on the face, body language and context. However, context and cultural backgrounds have been shown to influence the visual perception and interpretation of emotion. Cultural aesthetic preferences seem to unconsciously direct attention to certain features of the face. For example, Caucasians generally fixate around eyes, nose and mouth, while Asians fixate on eyes. This fixation on different features of the face leads to disparate reading of emotions. Asians’ focus on the eyes lead to the perception of startled faces as surprise rather than fear. As a result, previous associations or customs of an individual can lead to different categorization or recognition of emotion. This particular difference in visual perception of emotion seems to suggest an attention bias mechanism for wishful seeing, since certain visual cues were attended to (e.g. nose, eyes) and the others were ignored (e.g. mouth).