Category-specific attention for animals reflects ancestral priorities, not expertise

Joshua New; Leda Cosmides; John Tooby

doi:10.1073/pnas.0703913104

Edited by Gordon H. Orians, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, and approved August 10, 2007 (received for review May 3, 2007)

Abstract

Visual attention mechanisms are known to select information to process based on current goals, personal relevance, and lower-level features. Here we present evidence that human visual attention also includes a high-level category-specialized system that monitors animals in an ongoing manner. Exposed to alternations between complex natural scenes and duplicates with a single change (a change-detection paradigm), subjects are substantially faster and more accurate at detecting changes in animals relative to changes in all tested categories of inanimate objects, even vehicles, which they have been trained for years to monitor for sudden life-or-death changes in trajectory. This animate monitoring bias could not be accounted for by differences in lower-level visual characteristics, how interesting the target objects were, experience, or expertise, implicating mechanisms that evolved to direct attention differentially to objects by virtue of their membership in ancestrally important categories, regardless of their current utility.

Footnotes

^‡To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: joshua.new{at}yale.edu
Author contributions: J.N., L.C., and J.T. designed research; J.N. performed research; J.N. and L.C. analyzed data; and J.N., L.C., and J.T. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
See Commentary on page 16396.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0703913104/DC1.
Abbreviations:
CD,
change detection;
Exp n,
Experiment n;
RT,
reaction time.
© 2007 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA