Conspiracy beliefs are associated with a reduction in frontal beta power and biases in categorizing ambiguous stimuli

Abdolvahed Narmashiri; Fatemeh Akbari; Ahmad Sohrabi; Javad Hatami

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e20249

Conspiracy beliefs are associated with a reduction in frontal beta power and biases in categorizing ambiguous stimuli

Heliyon. 2023 Sep 16;9(10):e20249. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e20249. eCollection 2023 Oct.

Authors

Abdolvahed Narmashiri^{1

2

3}, Fatemeh Akbari⁴, Ahmad Sohrabi⁵, Javad Hatami⁶

Affiliations

¹ School of Cognitive Sciences, Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), Tehran, Iran.
² Bio-intelligence Research Unit, Sharif Brain Center, Electrical Engineering Department, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.
³ Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran.
⁴ Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran.
⁵ University of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, Iran.
⁶ The University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

Prior beliefs, such as conspiracy beliefs, significantly influence our perception of the natural world. However, the brain activity associated with perceptual decision-making in conspiracy beliefs is not well understood. To shed light on this topic, we conducted a study examining the EEG activity of believers, and skeptics during resting state with perceptual decision-making task. Our study shows that conspiracy beliefs are related to the reduced power of beta frequency band. Furthermore, skeptics tended to misclassify ambiguous face stimuli as houses more frequently than believers. These results help to explain the differences in brain activity between believers and skeptics, especially in how conspiracy beliefs impact the categorization of ambiguous stimuli.

Keywords: Ambiguous stimuli; Conspiracy beliefs; EEG resting-state; Perceptual decision-making.