![]() ![]() "Those statistically pose much more of a threat to us than a tiger. It's very infrequent to have somebody afraid of cars or electrical outlets," New told LiveScience. "People develop phobias for spiders and snakes and things that were ancestral threats. These results have implications for phobias and other behaviors that involve focus toward specific categories of objects over others. The researchers compare our attentional bias toward animals to the appendix, an organ present in modern humans because it was useful for our ancestors, but useless now. Though we are more likely to meet death via an SUV than a charging wildebeest, the results indicated subjects were slower and less successful at detecting changes to vehicles than to animals. In particular, the students spotted changes in elephant and human scenes 100 percent of the time, while they had a success rate of just over 75 percent for photos showing a silo and 67 percent for those with a coffee mug. They correctly detected nearly 90 percent of the changes to "living" targets compared with 66 percent for inanimate objects. Overall, the subjects were faster and more accurate at detecting changes involving all animals compared with inanimate objects. The photographs included animate categories, such as people and other animals, as well as inanimate ones, such as plants, artifacts that can be manipulated (stapler or wheelbarrow) and fixed artifacts, such as landmarks (windmill or house). Participants indicated each time whether they detected a change. ![]() The flashing images alternated between pairs of various outdoor scenes, with the first image showing one scene and the next an alternate version of that scene with one change. In the study, groups of undergraduate students from UCSB, watched images displayed on computer monitors. ![]() "Having this pop-out attentional bias for animals is sort of a vestigial behavior," said study team member Joshua New of Yale University's Perception and Cognition Lab. While the environment has changed since then, with high-rises emerging where forests once took root and pampered pets taking the place of stalking beasts, our instinct-driven attention has not followed suit. Predators and prey took many different forms-lions, tigers and bears-and they changed often, so constant eyeballing was critical. Immersed in a rich, biotic environment, it would have been imperative for our ancestors to monitor both humans and non-human animals. ![]()
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