Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, University of Marburg, Gutenbergstr. 18, 35032, Marburg, Germany.
York University, Toronto, Canada.
Sci Rep. 2024 Aug 16;14(1):19006. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-69468-3.
Previous research on attention to fear-relevant stimuli has largely focused on static pictures or drawings, and thus did not consider the potential effect of natural motion. Here, we aimed to investigate the effect of motion on attentional capture in spider-fearful and non-fearful participants by using point-light stimuli and naturalistic videos. Point-light stimuli consist of moving dots representing joints and thereby visualizing biological motion (e.g. of a walking human or cat) without needing a visible body. Spider-fearful (n = 30) and non-spider-fearful (n = 31) participants completed a visual search task with moving targets (point-light/naturalistic videos) and static distractors (images), static targets and moving distractors, or static targets and static distractors. Participants searched for a specified animal type (snakes, spiders, cats, or doves) as quickly as possible. We replicated previous findings with static stimuli: snakes were detected faster and increased distraction, while spiders just increased distraction. However, contrary to our hypotheses, spider targets did not speed up responses, neither in the group of control nor in the group of spider-fearful participants. Interestingly, stimuli-specific effects were toned down, abolished, or even changed direction when motion was introduced. Also, we demonstrated that point-light stimuli were of similar efficiency as naturalistic videos, indicating that for testing effects of motion in visual search, "pure" motion stimuli might be sufficient. As we do show a substantial modulation of visual search phenomena by biological motion, we advocate for future studies to use moving stimuli, equivalent to our dynamic environment, to increase ecological validity.
先前关于对恐惧相关刺激的注意力的研究主要集中在静态图片或绘图上，因此没有考虑自然运动的潜在影响。在这里，我们旨在通过使用点光源刺激和自然视频来研究运动对蜘蛛恐惧和非恐惧参与者的注意力捕获的影响。点光源刺激由代表关节的移动点组成，从而可视化生物运动（例如，行走的人或猫），而无需可见的身体。蜘蛛恐惧（n=30）和非蜘蛛恐惧（n=31）参与者使用移动目标（点光源/自然视频）和静态干扰物（图像）、静态目标和移动干扰物或静态目标和静态干扰物完成视觉搜索任务。参与者尽可能快地搜索指定的动物类型（蛇、蜘蛛、猫或鸽子）。我们用静态刺激复制了先前的发现：蛇的检测速度更快，干扰也更大，而蜘蛛只是增加了干扰。然而，与我们的假设相反，蜘蛛目标既没有在控制组中也没有在蜘蛛恐惧组中加快反应速度。有趣的是，当引入运动时，刺激特异性效应被减弱、消除甚至改变方向。此外，我们证明了点光源刺激与自然视频具有相似的效率，表明在测试视觉搜索中的运动效应时，“纯”运动刺激可能就足够了。由于我们确实显示了生物运动对视觉搜索现象的实质性调制，因此我们主张未来的研究使用类似于我们动态环境的运动刺激来提高生态有效性。
