Motivation

A perceiver's own needs and desires exert a strong influence on what that person perceives. People generally want to fulfil their various needs and desires, and one way this happens is by perceiving ambiguous objects or scenes as things that would help satisfy a currently active need. This has been demonstrated experimentally in studies examining the influence of hunger on perception: when genuinely hungry participants were shown deliberately ambiguous pictures, they were found to interpret these pictures as depicting food-related objects considerably more often than participants who had already eaten and were not hungry (satiated participants). This shows t …