There Is No Naked Eye: How Higher-Order Social Concepts Clothe Visual Perception

Vision researchers have investigated many sources of information that assist perception. Although basic visual properties of stimuli can alter interpretation, the following 5 studies contend that implicit, complex, social information significantly influences basic visual perception. Study 1 employed a scrambled sentence priming procedure used to activate concepts without participants’ awareness. Studies 2, 4, and 5 used less contrived priming techniques that required participants to read paragraphs related to the intended prime. Study 3 utilized self-generated primes created through minimal prompting. All priming procedures resulted in an increase in the proportion of initial percepts that were related to the primed concept. These priming procedures not only demonstrate the influence of complex information on perception of ambiguous figures but of indistinct natural