Could complex beliefs like paranoia have roots in something as basic as vision? A new Yale study finds evidence that they might.
When completing a visual perception task, in which participants had to identify whether one moving dot was chasing another moving dot, those with greater tendencies toward paranoid thinking (believing others intend them harm) and teleological thinking (ascribing excessive meaning and purpose to events) performed worse than their counterparts, the study found. Those individuals more often—and confidently—claimed one dot was chasing the other when it wasn’t.
The findings, published in the journal Communications Psychology, suggest that in the future, testing for illnesses like schizophrenia could be done with a simple eye test.
