Chasing Animals With Split Attention: Are Animals Prioritized in Visual Tracking?

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 sti

SUBMITTER: Hagen T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6124190 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Sep-Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature