Abstract
The “animate monitoring” hypothesis proposes that humans are evolutionarily predisposed to recruit attention toward animals. Support for this has repeatedly been obtained through the change detection paradigm where animals are detected faster than artifacts. The present study shows that the advantage for animals does not stand up to more rigorous experimental controls. Experiment 1 used artificially generated change detection scenes and counterbalanced identical target objects across two sets of scenes. Results showed that detection performance is determined more by the surrounding scene than semantic category. Experiment 2 used photographs from the original studies and replaced the target animals with artifacts in the exact same locations, such that the surrounding scene was kept constant while manipulating the target category. Results replicated the original studies when photos were not manipulated but agreed with the findings of our first experiment in that the advantage shifted to the artifacts when object categories replaced each other in the original scenes. A third experiment used inverted and blurred images so as to disrupt high-level perception but failed to erase the advantage for animals. Hence, the present set of results questions whether the supposed attentional advantage for animals can be supported by evidence from the change detection paradigm.
Highlights
The ‘‘animate monitoring’’ hypothesis (New, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2007) states that modern humans have inherited a mechanism which biases attention toward animate objects
Further t tests conducted to investigate this result showed that animals (M 1⁄4 3,176 ms, SD 1⁄4 559 ms) were detected significantly faster than artifacts (M 1⁄4 3,403 ms, SD 1⁄4 533 ms), t(148) 1⁄4 8.3, p < .001, 95% CI [173, 281], d 1⁄4 0.41, in Experiment 1A while artifacts (M 1⁄4 3,071 ms, SD 1⁄4 515 ms) were detected significantly faster than animals (M 1⁄4 3,346 ms, SD 1⁄4 541 ms), t(121) 1⁄4 9.1, p < 0.001, 95% CI [215, 334], d 1⁄4 0.52, in Experiment 1B
This demonstrates a complete reversal of the typical advantage for animals described in the literature and suggests that the advantage for either image set may not be specific to the category of the target object
Summary
The ‘‘animate monitoring’’ hypothesis (New, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2007) states that modern humans have inherited a mechanism which biases attention toward animate objects. I-Perception (2007) argued for the existence of such a mechanism by testing human subjects in a ‘‘change detection’’ task (Simons & Levin, 1997) where photographs containing animals and artifacts (man-made objects) would rapidly change (e.g., by repeatedly removing and reinserting a target object) Such a task consists of displaying a sequence of images for short durations (e.g., 250 ms): first the original image, a blank image before a modified image is displayed, the sequence is completed by a second blank before it is repeated (see Figure 1 for an illustration). The resulting time taken to detect the target is typically interpreted as a measure of how quickly attention can be drawn to the target
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