Lobue Vanessa, DeLoache Judy S
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2008 Mar;19(3):284-9. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02081.x.
Snakes are among the most common targets of fears and phobias. In visual detection tasks, adults detect their presence more rapidly than the presence of other kinds of visual stimuli. We report evidence that very young children share this attentional bias. In three experiments, preschool children and adults were asked to find a single target picture among an array of eight distractors. Both the children and the adults detected snakes more rapidly than three types of nonthreatening stimuli (flowers, frogs, and caterpillars). These results provide the first evidence of enhanced visual detection of evolutionarily relevant threat stimuli in young children.
蛇是恐惧和恐惧症最常见的对象之一。在视觉检测任务中，成年人比其他种类的视觉刺激更快地察觉到蛇的存在。我们报告的证据表明，幼儿也有这种注意力偏差。在三个实验中，学龄前儿童和成年人被要求在一系列八个干扰物中找到一张目标图片。儿童和成年人检测到蛇的速度都比三种无威胁性刺激物（花、青蛙和毛毛虫）更快。这些结果首次证明了幼儿对进化相关威胁刺激的视觉检测能力增强。
