Abstract

Some evolutionary psychologists have hypothesized that animals have priority in human attention. That is, they should be detected and selected more efficiently than other types of objects, especially man-made ones. Such a priority mechanism should automatically deploy more attentional resources and dynamic monitoring toward animal stimuli than nonanimals. Consequently, we postulated that variations of the multiple object or identity tracking and multiple event monitoring tasks should be particularly suitable paradigms for addressing the animate monitoring hypothesis, given their dynamic properties and dependency on divided attention. We used images of animals and artifacts and found neither a substantial sign of improvement in tracking the positions associated with animal stimuli nor a significant distracting effect of animals. We also failed to observe a significant prioritization in orders of response for positions associated with animals. While we observed an advantage for animals in event monitoring, this appeared to be dependent on properties of the task, as confirmed in further experiments. Moreover, we observed a small but inconclusive advantage for animals in identity accuracy. Thus, under certain conditions, some bias toward animals could be observed, but the evidence was weak and inconclusive. To conclude, effect sizes were generally small and not conclusively in favor of the expected attentional bias for animals. We found moderate to strong evidence that images of animals do not improve positional tracking, do not act as more effective distractors, are not selected prior to artifacts in the response phase, and are not easier to monitor for changes in size.

Highlights

  • IntroductionAccording to the animate monitoring hypothesis (New, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2007), modern humans have inherited a perceptual mechanism that automatically monitors animate objects (i.e., humans and animals) or, in other words, items with high biological relevance (e.g., prey or predators)

  • According to the animate monitoring hypothesis (New, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2007), modern humans have inherited a perceptual mechanism that automatically monitors animate objects or, in other words, items with high biological relevance

  • A t test on tracking accuracy between the two categories showed no significant difference in accuracy between animal and artifact targets, t(62) 1⁄4 0.9, p 1⁄4 .37, 95% confidence interval (CI) [À0.91, 2.4], dz 1⁄4 0.11, drm 1⁄4 0.058, common language (CL) effect size 1⁄4 55%

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Summary

Introduction

According to the animate monitoring hypothesis (New, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2007), modern humans have inherited a perceptual mechanism that automatically monitors animate objects (i.e., humans and animals) or, in other words, items with high biological relevance (e.g., prey or predators). In several neuropsychological studies, it has been shown that some patients can show a striking deficit for identifying animals while having a nearly intact ability to identify artifacts, whereas other patients show the reverse dissociation. Such findings are, not limited to patients, as a normal category-specific tendency in object identification has been observed in healthy individuals as well (Capitani, Laiacona, Barbarotto, & Trivelli, 1994; Lag, 2005; Lag Hveem, Ruud, & Laeng, 2006; Laws & Hunter, 2006; Laws & Neve, 1999). Neurophysiological studies have shown a distinction between animate and inanimate objects in both humans and monkeys (e.g., inferotemporal response clustering of animate and inanimate objects; Kriegeskorte et al, 2008) and functional imaging have indicated similar distinctions (Konkle & Caramazza, 2013; Sha et al, 2015; Wiggett, Pritchard, & Downing, 2009), even in blind subjects without any prior visual experience (Mahon, Anzellotti, Schwarzbach, Zampini, & Caramazza, 2009)

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