Here's looking at you: Visual similarity exacerbates the Moses illusion for semantically similar celebrities.

When people read questions like "How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark?", many mistakenly answer "2" despite knowing that Noah sailed the ark. This "Moses illusion" occurs when names share semantic features. Two experiments examined whether shared visual concepts (facial features) exacerbate Moses illusions for celebrity names. Questions contained an unrelated distractor name or a semantic distractor name that was visually similar or dissimilar to the correct target name. Both experiments revealed more Moses illusions occurred for questions containing a visually similar semantic distractor compared with either visually dissimilar or unrelated distractors. Furthermore, presenting a picture of the target (Experiment 1) or the visually similar distractor (Experiment 2) before the question increased accurate detection of the illusion, independent of distractor type. Results challenge theoretical explanations of the Moses illusion as resulting from purely shallow semantic processing and demonstrate the importance of visual information in processing proper names, even when presented in written form. (PsycINFO Database Record