Hagen Thomas, Laeng Bruno
Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.
Iperception. 2016 Jun 27;7(3):2041669516651366. doi: 10.1177/2041669516651366. eCollection 2016 May.
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.
“动态监测”假说提出，人类在进化过程中倾向于将注意力转向动物。通过变化检测范式反复获得了对此的支持，在该范式中，动物比人工制品被检测得更快。本研究表明，动物的优势在更严格的实验控制下并不成立。实验1使用人工生成的变化检测场景，并在两组场景中对相同的目标物体进行平衡处理。结果表明，检测性能更多地取决于周围场景而非语义类别。实验2使用了原始研究中的照片，并在完全相同的位置用人工制品替换了目标动物，这样在操纵目标类别时周围场景保持不变。当照片未被处理时，结果重现了原始研究，但与我们第一个实验的结果一致，即在原始场景中物体类别相互替换时，优势转向了人工制品。第三个实验使用了倒置和模糊的图像，以干扰高级感知，但未能消除对动物的优势。因此，本系列结果质疑了变化检测范式的证据是否能支持所谓的对动物的注意力优势。
