Kawai Nobuyuki, Koda Hiroki
Graduate School of Information Science, Nagoya University.
Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University.
J Comp Psychol. 2016 Aug;130(3):299-303. doi: 10.1037/com0000032. Epub 2016 Apr 14.
Humans quickly detect the presence of evolutionary threats through visual perception. Many theorists have considered humans to be predisposed to respond to both snakes and spiders as evolutionarily fear-relevant stimuli. Evidence supports that human adults, children, and snake-naive monkeys all detect pictures of snakes among pictures of flowers more quickly than vice versa, but recent neurophysiological and behavioral studies suggest that spiders may, in fact, be processed similarly to nonthreat animals. The evidence of quick detection and rapid fear learning by primates is limited to snakes, and no such evidence exists for spiders, suggesting qualitative differences between fear of snakes and fear of spiders. Here, we show that snake-naive Japanese monkeys detect a single snake picture among 8 nonthreat animal pictures (koala) more quickly than vice versa; however, no such difference in detection was observed between spiders and pleasant animals. These robust differences between snakes and spiders are the most convincing evidence that the primate visual system is predisposed to pay attention to snakes but not spiders. These findings suggest that attentional bias toward snakes has an evolutionary basis but that bias toward spiders is more due to top-down, conceptually driven effects of emotion on attention capture. (PsycINFO Database Record
人类通过视觉感知能够迅速察觉到进化威胁的存在。许多理论家认为，人类倾向于将蛇和蜘蛛都视为与进化相关的恐惧刺激源。有证据表明，人类成年人、儿童以及从未接触过蛇的猴子，在花丛图片中都能比在蛇的图片中更快地识别出蛇的图片，但最近的神经生理学和行为学研究表明，实际上蜘蛛可能与非威胁性动物的处理方式类似。灵长类动物快速检测和快速恐惧学习的证据仅限于蛇，而对于蜘蛛则不存在这样的证据，这表明对蛇的恐惧和对蜘蛛的恐惧存在质的差异。在这里，我们表明，从未接触过蛇的日本猕猴在8张非威胁性动物图片（考拉）中检测到一张蛇的图片比反过来检测要快；然而，在蜘蛛和可爱动物之间未观察到这种检测差异。蛇和蜘蛛之间的这些明显差异是最有说服力的证据，表明灵长类动物的视觉系统倾向于关注蛇而不是蜘蛛。这些发现表明，对蛇的注意力偏向具有进化基础，但对蜘蛛的偏向更多是由于自上而下的、概念驱动的情绪对注意力捕捉的影响。（PsycINFO数据库记录）
