Dawei Bai¹, Kara Weisman², Eleanor Schille-Hudson³, Elliott Ihm⁴, Ann Taves⁴, Tanya Marie Luhrmann³, Brian Scholl¹; ¹Yale University, ²University of California, Riverside, ³Stanford University, ⁴University of California, Santa Barbara

When simple geometric shapes move about a display, what do we see? Beyond the obvious lower-level properties (e.g. direction, velocity), we may also spontaneously and even irresistibly perceive seemingly higher-level properties in certain displays -- such as one object *chasing* another. Here we asked whether such percepts might relate to a rather different form of phenomenology: the experience of supernatural or spiritual presences. If some people move through their daily lives perceiving higher degrees of agency, could this also manifest in more reports of sensing the presence of gods or other spiritual beings? Whereas some past work has theorized about such connections, here we isolate visual processing (vs. higher-level interpretation) by exploring correlations with objective visuomotor detection and performance. Subjects viewed displays filled with multiple identical moving discs. One (the 'sheep') was controlled by their own mouse movements, while another (the 'wolf') pursued the sheep. Subjects could only avoid being 'caught' by identifying the wolf's motion amidst the many distractors. Afterwards, subjects also completed two prominent and nuanced measures of spiritual experience (the 'Spiritual Events scale', and the 'Inventory of Non-Ordinary Experiences'). The results were striking: subjects who reported spiritual or supernatural experiences (via both measures) were worse at detecting chasing (and thus avoiding the wolf) -- and this difference in psychophysical functions could not be explained by either demographic variables (e.g. age, education) or more generic measures of religious belief or practice. We explain this by appeal to a type of 'hyperactive agency detection': people who perceive agency even in 'distractors' (and are therefore worse at detecting chasing) are more likely to report spiritual experiences. This work thus highlights a striking connection between a form of basic visual detection and some of the most powerful experiences in many people's lives.

Acknowledgements: This project was funded by a grant from the Templeton Foundation.