The Effect of Motivation on Perception (AQA GCSE Psychology)

• Motivation involves a strong desire or reason for performing an action or engaging in specific behaviours/cognitions e.g. ‘I am motivated to do well in my Psychology GCSE so I will put in lots of revision’
• In short, motivation affects perception as it increases the attractiveness of an action/object/person/behaviour e.g. ‘I wish I had enough money to buy those trainers’: this is known as perceptual accentuation (desire increases when what we want is out of reach)
• Being in a deprived state (e.g. hungry, thirsty, tired) can lead to perceptual accentuation as the object of desire becomes more acute and noticeable due to the deprivation of e.g. ‘I can’t stop thinking about my bed, I’m so exhausted!’
• If someone feels hungry, for example, they may find that adverts for food stand out and take on more of a significance for them than if they had been full 

Motivation on Perception Diagram

Hunger may mean that the more filling (and ‘less healthy’) foods stand out more and seem more appealing.

• The researchers’ aim was to test whether food deprivation would have an effect on the perception of food-related images
• 26 university students were randomly assigned to one of two conditions:
  • To go without food for 20 hours
  • To consume food within 20 hours (the second condition acted as the control group)
• In both conditions the participants viewed four slides showing different foods (e.g. fried chicken, burger)
• After each slide had been shown the projector was turned off and then on again, and each participant was asked to adjust the slide for brightness so that it looked as it had looked when they first viewed it
  • The food-deprived participants adjusted the slides to a higher level of brightness  (which was a brighter level than that used on the original slide) than the control group participants did
• The researchers concluded that food deprivation influenced perceptual accentuation:
  • The deprived participants saw the food as brighter than the control participants did, hence they were motivated to see the food as more appealing due to having been deprived of it for 20 hours

Does this cake shine brightly to you?...(if so you may need to eat something soon!)

Evaluation of the effect of motivation on perception

Strengths

• There is good application to this theory: it could be used to inform weight-loss programmes and to help people understand the relationship between perception and food intake/choice
• The use of a control group was important as it meant that the researchers were able to measure the effect of the independent variable on the [popover id="3bmtrErjhM8LAzHC" label="dependent variable"]

Weaknesses

• There are some ethical issues which the researchers should have considered and which, if neglected, could have led to participants being harmed in the study e.g. no participants with diabetes should take part due to the risks involved in them being food-deprived
• The study lacks validity as it asked participants to rate images of food rather than presenting them with actual food (the task was artificial)