Abstract
Presentation of faces of living animals (dog, human) and nonliving models (coyote, mink) to prairie rattlesnakes, Crotalus viridis viridis, and Western Massasauga rattlesnakes, Sistrurus catenatus tergeminus, for 10-sec. intervals of visual inspection established that movement is the primary component in eliciting defensive and exploratory responses. These snakes probably are not sensitive to any particular static conformational features of the faces of canids or mustelids, indicating the incorrectness of an initial working hypothesis that such features are releasers of defensive behavior. Since small moving objects tend to release predatory attack behavior while large moving objects release defensive behavior, we offer the hypothesis that a movement-size feature detection system mediates these visually guided behaviors.
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