Dawei Bai¹ (), Joan Danielle K. Ongchoco², Kara Weisman³, Eleanor Schille-Hudson³, Elliott Ihm⁴, Ann Taves⁴, Tanya Marie Luhrmann³, Brian Scholl¹; ¹Yale University, ²University of British Columbia, ³Stanford University, ⁴University of California Santa Barbara

The input to visual perception is a continuous wash of light, but what we see are structured scenes of discrete objects. Discrete structure is so fundamental that the visual system may effectively create it in its absence. A particularly striking example occurs in the phenomenon of ‘scaffolded attention’: when staring at a regular grid of squares (as in graph paper, or floor tiles), many people report spontaneously seeing the squares as grouped into a shifting array of structured patterns (e.g. a block-letter E). (This phenomenon does not occur without the grid, which serves as a ‘scaffold’ for attention to group subsets of squares.) Might such ‘everyday hallucinations’ of structure relate to higher-order experiences and beliefs? To find out, we explored its relationship to some of the most profound and life-changing experiences in many people’s lives: experiences of supernatural presences (as when seeing a vision of a deity). Observers viewed a uniform grid of squares, and were then asked if they saw the squares as grouped into any shapes or patterns, after which they deliberately tried to see such patterns. The same observers then completed a nuanced measure of supernatural experiences (the Spiritual Events scale). Across a large sample (n=1000), these two forms of experience were related: people who experienced ‘supernatural presence’ were considerably more likely to spontaneously experience scaffolded attention. And yet, these people were actually *less* able to do so when explicitly instructed — suggesting that the connection may be specific to *spontaneous* experiences (and cannot be due merely to suggestibility). Crucially, these links could not be explained by general degrees of religiosity, or by demographic factors such as education level. These findings suggest a robust link between two types of experiences that may seem maximally distant: perceiving visual structure, and feeling the presence of supernatural beings.

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