Article

And along came a spider: An attentional bias for the detection of spiders in young children and adults

September 2010
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 107(1):59-66

DOI:10.1016/j.jecp.2010.04.005

Source
PubMed

Authors:

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Spiders are among the most common targets of fears and phobias in the world. In visual search tasks, adults detect their presence more rapidly than other kinds of stimuli. Reported here is an investigation of whether young children share this attentional bias for the detection of spiders. In a series of experiments, preschoolers and adults were asked to find the single spider picture among an array of eight mushrooms or cockroaches or the reverse. Both children and adults detected the presence of spiders more rapidly than both categories of distracter stimuli. Furthermore, there was no difference between the detection of two neutral stimuli (cockroaches vs. mushrooms). These results provide the first evidence of enhanced visual detection of spiders in young children.

The effects of direct and averted gazes on object-based attention

Article

Jul 2022
Acta Psychol Sin

Neutral animals matter: Animacy modulates object-based attentional allocation

Article

Full-text available

May 2022

Animacy plays an essential role in survival and adaptive behavior. Previous studies have found that dangerous or threatening animals can capture and hold attention. However, it is unclear whether and how neutral animate objects guide attentional allocation. It is also uncertain whether the modulation of animate objects on attentional allocation is based on the object itself (object-based attention) or its location (space-based attention). Therefore, the present study adopted the well-established two-rectangle paradigm and used animate and inanimate objects as stimuli to test the abovementioned problems. The results revealed that object-based effects were obtained for both animate and inanimate objects. However, the object-based effects were larger when the cue appeared on the animate objects than on the inanimate objects, due to faster response to invalid same-object trials and slower response to invalid different-object trials. Beyond that, we also further confirmed that animacy itself, not the low-level visual complexity, led to the differential object-based effects. These results suggest that neutral animals also mattered to our attentional allocation and animacy can modulate object-based attentional selection by capturing and holding visual attention on the animate objects. Ultimately, the present study not only enriches our understanding of how neutral animate objects guide attentional allocation and support the attentional prioritization theory, but also further extends and amends the animate-monitoring hypothesis.

The evil eye effect: vertical pupils are perceived as more threatening

Article

Nov 2018
COGNITION EMOTION

Popular culture has many examples of evil characters having vertically pupilled eyes. Humans have a long evolutionary history of rivalry with snakes and their visual systems were evolved to rapidly detect snakes and snake-related cues. Considering such evolutionary background, we hypothesised that humans would perceive vertical pupils, which are characteristics of ambush predators including some of the snakes, as threatening. In seven studies (aggregate N = 1458) conducted on samples from American and Turkish samples, we found that vertical pupils are perceived as more threatening on both explicit (Study 1) and implicit level (Studies 2–7) and they are associated with physical, rather than social, threat (Study 4). Findings provided partial support regarding our hypothesis about the relevance of snake detection processes: Snake phobia, and not spider phobia, was found to be related to perceiving vertical pupils as threatening (Study 5), however an experimental manipulation of saliency of snakes rendered no significant effect (Study 6) and a comparison of fears of snakes, alligators, and cats did not support our prediction (Study 7). We discuss the potential implications and limitations of these novel findings.

Maternal attachment security modulates the relationship between vulnerability to anxiety and attentional bias to threat in healthy children

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2024

This study aimed to investigate whether attentional bias to threat, commonly observed in clinically anxious children, also manifests in healthy children, potentially aiding the early detection of at-risk individuals. Additionally, it sought to explore the moderating role of parent–child attachment security on the association between vulnerability factors (anxiety sensitivity, intolerance of uncertainty, perseverative cognitions) as indicators of vulnerability to anxiety, and attentional bias towards threat in healthy children. A total of 95 children aged 8 to 12 years completed the Visual Search Task to assess attentional bias. Vulnerability to anxiety was measured using a composite score derived from the Childhood Anxiety Sensitivity Index, Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale for Children, and Perseverative Thinking Questionnaire. Parent–child attachment security was assessed using the Security Scale-Child Self-Report. Analyses revealed that higher vulnerability to anxiety was associated with faster detection of anger-related stimuli compared to neutral ones, and this association was further influenced by high maternal security. These findings in healthy children suggest an interaction between specific factors related to anxiety vulnerability and the security of the mother–child relationship, leading to cognitive patterns resembling those seen in clinically anxious individuals. These results hold promise for early identification of children at risk of developing anxiety disorders.

Can the processing of task-irrelevant threatening stimuli be inhibited? - The role of shape and valence in the saliency of threatening objects

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2024
ACTA PSYCHOL

Numerous studies have demonstrated that attention is quickly oriented towards threatening stimuli, and that this attentional bias is difficult to inhibit. The root cause(s) of this bias may be attributable to the affective (e.g., valence) or visual features (e.g., shape) of threats. In two experiments (behavioral, eye-tracking), we tested which features play a bigger role in the salience of threats. In both experiments, participants looked for a neutral target (butterfly, lock) among other neutral objects. In half of the trials a threatening (snake, gun) or nonthreatening (but visually similar; worm, hairdryer) task-irrelevant distractor was also present at a near or far distance from the target. Behavioral results indicate that both distractor types interfered with task performance. Rejecting nonthreatening distractors as nontargets was easier when they were presented further from the target but distance had no effect when the distractor was threatening. Eye-tracking results showed that participants fixated less often (and for less time) on threatening compared to nonthreatening distractors. They also viewed targets for less time when a threatening distractor was present (compared to nonthreatening). Results suggest that visual features of threats are easier to suppress than affective features, and the latter may have a stronger role in eliciting attentional biases.

“Good Night, Sleep Tight”: Do we have an “Evolutionary Preference” for Placing Beds in Sleeping Rooms? A Replication and Extension of Spörrle and Stich (2010)

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2023

In the distant past, hunter-gatherers had to manage the risk of attacks from other human beings and dangerous animals not only when awake, but also when asleep—a time during which humans are particularly vulnerable. Thus, one hypothesis is that humans evolved to choose “safe spaces” to sleep. Spörrle and Stich (2010) provided evidence for this hypothesis using 2D-floor plans and by asking participants to arrange pieces of furniture in a bedroom (bed, chair, table, closet). The aim of the present research was to replicate and extend Spörrle and Stich’s (2010) findings. In two studies, participants had to position furniture in a sleeping room in the way they liked it best. Study 1 conducted with French participants was a quasi-replication of Spörrle and Stich (2010) using 2D-floor plans of a bedroom that differed in the opening direction of the door (left versus right) and the presence (versus absence) of a window. Study 2 with Slovak participants used the same design but this time with 3D-room plans. Finally, in Study 3 involving both French and Slovak participants, we examined the hypothesis that when participants are asked to imagine sleeping in a particular bedroom, a bed position that increases the risk of attack or predation (“unsafe position”) will elicit greater feelings of discomfort than a bed position that reduces such risks. Taken overall, the findings provide further evidence that the positioning of beds in modern sleeping rooms has been shaped by the ancestral requirement of being protected during the night.

Attentional Bias to Threat: Examining Associations with Children’s Emotional Regulation and Interactions with Intimate Partner Violence

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2021
CHILD PSYCHIAT HUM D

Intimate partner violence (IPV) in the home—a prevalent environmental risk for children—exemplifies a key factor that may alter the role of attentional bias to threat (ABT) in children’s psychological adjustment. The current study aims to (1) examine potential variations in ABT and emotion regulation across animal and face stimuli and (2) test IPV as a potential moderator of the relationship between ABT and child outcomes. Participating children (N = 37) completed computerized tasks assessing ABT. Mothers provided data on IPV in the home, child victimization, and child emotion regulation. Children’s ABT toward animal stimuli was not associated with emotion regulation; IPV significantly moderated the link between ABT and emotion regulation (β = − 0.06, p < .001). At low levels of IPV, children’s ABT and emotion regulation were not related, but at high levels of IPV, ABT was negatively associated with emotion regulation skills. The relevance of ABT for understanding functioning may vary by both stimulus selection and by previous experiences of environmental risk.

What Makes Spiders Frightening and Disgusting to People?

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2021

The quality of human-animal interactions may crucially influence conservation efforts. Unfortunately, and despite their important roles in the functioning of the ecosystem, some animals are considered notoriously unpopular. Using the forced-choice paradigm, we investigated which cues humans perceive as frightening and disgusting in spiders, one of the most unpleasant animals in the world. The research was carried out with a representative sample of N = 1,015 Slovak adults. We found that perceived fear and disgust of spiders were triggered predominantly by enlarged chelicerae, enlarged abdomen, and the presence of body hair. Longer legs were associated with perceived fear as well; however, the presence of two eyes did not produce any statistical significance in terms of fear. We hope that further research in this field, where additional cues can be manipulated (e.g., color and number of legs), will improve conservation efforts by using an improved reputation of spiders in the eyes of the general public.

Investigating evolutionary constraints on the detection of threatening stimuli in preschool children

Article

Sep 2019
ACTA PSYCHOL

Numerous objects and animals could be threatening, and thus, children learn to avoid them early. Spiders and syringes are among the most common targets of fears and phobias of the modern word. However, they are of different origins: while the former is evolutionary relevant, the latter is not. We sought to investigate the underlying mechanisms that make the quick detection of such stimuli possible and enable the impulse to avoid them in the future. The respective categories of threatening and non-threatening targets were similar in shape, while low-level visual features were controlled. Our results showed that children found threatening cues faster, irrespective of the evolutionary age of the cues. However, they detected non-threatening evolutionary targets faster than non-evolutionary ones. We suggest that the underlying mechanism may be different: general feature detection can account for finding evolutionary threatening cues quickly, while specific features detection is more appropriate for modern threatening stimuli.

The influence of spider news on online information-seeking

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2024
PLOS ONE

Fear of spiders is a widespread condition often disproportionate to the actual danger spiders pose to humans. Likely rooted in evolutionary history, fear of spiders might also have a cultural component. Recent studies have shown that a significant fraction of spider-related media reports are misleading and sensationalistic. Information-seeking behaviours serve as common coping mechanisms for our fears and anxieties, yet the link between spider-related news stories and such behaviors remains unexplored. We hypothesize that media reports foster concern about spiders, resulting in an increased awareness of spiders and health issues associated with them. We extracted 1486 reports in English from a public database providing a content-analysis of spider-related online traditional media reports published between 2010–2020. We examined whether the volume of spider-related queries in Google Trends, Wikipedia, and iNaturalist increased in the week following the publication of each news story. Sensationalistic news stories were associated with a small, significant increase in search volumes, compared to non-sensationalistic ones. The search volume for “brown recluse” (Loxosceles reclusa), which are potentially dangerous spiders, was higher after the publication date of news related to human-spider encounters. There was a significant positive relationship between the number of spider-related news stories published in a given month and the traffic on target spider-related Wikipedia pages, especially so for the page on brown recluse spiders. Our results suggest that traditional media have a detectable impact on the behaviour of the general public towards spiders, supporting the hypothesis that the fear of spiders is perpetuated by culture. Additionally, our findings indicate that information-seeking behaviour is a common response to learn about spiders and potentially fact-check spurious claims found in sensationalised news. By recognizing the role of media in shaping attitudes towards spiders and acknowledging the benefits of accurate representation, we can lay the foundation for a more informed and harmonious relationship between humans and spiders.

Vigilant and Prepared: Working Memory-Driven Attentional Capture by Task-Irrelevant Threat Is Contingent Upon Action Preparation

Preprint

Full-text available

Jul 2024

Chris Brown

Threat-associated stimuli can capture our attention even when they are task-irrelevant. It has, however, not been determined whether this interference can be caused by background threat-detection goals active in visual working memory (VWM). To test this, five dual-task combined visual search and VWM change detection task experiments were run (4/5 pre-registered; total N = 119), in which participants had to detect the change in either positive (kitten) or threat-related (spider) animal exemplars across a trial, whilst performing an intervening visual search task with peripheral distractors from these affective categories. It was hypothesised that threat-related spider and positive kitten distractors would disrupt search efficiency more, versus a neutral (bird or no distractor) baseline, when congruent with the contents of VWM. Experiments 1a, 2, and 3, however, found no evidence of increased capture by VWM-matching affective stimuli, despite cumulative evidence across all experiments of goal-independent value-driven interference by spiders, and a separate self-report rating study (Experiment 1b; n = 82) confirming the distractors’ affective associations. When, however, the trial structure became unpredictable, requiring constant preparation for the VWM task response (Experiment 4), or advanced action preparation to the VWM task was enabled (Experiment 5), then VWM-matching threat-related distractors caused greater interference – though these results were absent for positive distractors. The results provide evidence for distinct goal-driven and value-driven attentional capture by threat; and suggests that a background goal-driven mechanism may operate depending on varying states of action preparation and prioritisation in VWM, rather than task-relevance amplifying affective perceptual inputs.

Visual features drive attentional bias for threat

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2024
VIS COGN

Past studies argued that the attentional capture by threats is hard to inhibit. When using threats as task-irrelevant stimuli, this effect can deteriorate performance on the primary task. Whether attentional capture is driven by affective information (threat) or visual features (shape) is still debated. Here we aimed to investigate the role of threat value and shape in modulating attentional resources by conducting two experiments (total N = 87). Participants engaged in a semantic vigilance task responding to masked words appearing at the centre of the screen while ignoring threat-relevant (threatening or visually similar but nonthreatening) and neutral control distractor images placed at different distances from the target word. We found no performance difference between participants exposed to threat-related stimuli via affective or shape features. Moreover, while performance decreased when a neutral distractor appeared close (compared to further away) to the target word, stimulus eccentricity had no effect when the distractor (irrespective of the conveying feature) was threat relevant. Our findings are in line with previous studies showing an initial capture of attention by threat-relevant information but that this negative effect is compensated by an increase in arousal. We conclude that even the visual features of a stimulus can modulate attention toward threats.

Age-dependent changes in the anger superiority effect: Evidence from a visual search task

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2024

The perception of threatening facial expressions is a critical skill necessary for detecting the emotional states of others and responding appropriately. The anger superiority effect hypothesis suggests that individuals are better at processing and identifying angry faces compared with other nonthreatening facial expressions. In adults, the anger superiority effect is present even after controlling for the bottom-up visual saliency, and when ecologically valid stimuli are used. However, it is as yet unclear whether this effect is present in children. To fill this gap, we tested the anger superiority effect in children ages 6-14 years in a visual search task by using emotional dynamic stimuli and equating the visual salience of target and distractors. The results suggest that in childhood, the angry superiority effect consists of improved accuracy in detecting angry faces, while in adolescence, the ability to discriminate angry faces undergoes further development, enabling faster and more accurate threat detection.

The searchscape of fear: A global analysis of internet search trends for biophobias

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2023

Human relationships with nature may sometimes manifest through fear, disgust and other disease‐avoidance mechanisms. While there is an evolutionary utility to these so‐called ‘biophobias’, many people exhibit phobic responses towards organisms that pose no tangible threats, potentially leading to excessive anxiety and avoidance of interactions with nature. Understanding the drivers of the prevalence and spread of biophobias in modern societies is, therefore, a growing concern. Here, we posit that online information‐seeking patterns may reveal general insights into biophobias. Using a culturomics approach, we gathered temporal (2004–2022) and country‐level data on the volume of internet searches for 25 biophobias, as well as 25 general phobias acting as a benchmark group. We explored temporal trends in the volume of search for each biophobias and modelled relationships between search volume for biophobias and five country‐level variables. We observed a steady increase in online search volume for biophobias between 2004 and 2022. Yet, there were marked differences in individual trends, with 17 biophobias showing positive, three negative and five stationary temporal trends. Arachnophobia (fear of spiders) attracted the most interest, followed by mysophobia (fear of microbes) and parasitophobia (fear of parasites). The United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Mexico and India recorded wide interest in most biophobias, whereas 49% of countries showed no search volume for any biophobia. Search patterns for biophobias were strongly associated with the percentage of urban population, urban population growth and the number of extant venomous species in a given country. Conversely, search patterns for biophobias were weakly correlated with the incidence of anxiety disorders in a country's population and the likelihood of encounters with venomous animals. Our results provide quantitative support to the hypothesis that biophobias are broadly prevalent and possibly increasing as a result of widespread urbanisation and loss of experiences with nature. We suggest that people affected by biophobic disorders may be using the Internet as a key venue to seek relevant information to appraise their condition and identify coping mechanisms. These findings have broad ramifications for understanding and mitigating human–wildlife conflicts and the prevalence of widespread biophobic sentiments in modern societies.

Using video games to understand sex differences in attentional biases for weapons

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2022
PLOS ONE

Attentional biases for threatening stimuli of various kinds have been repeatedly demonstrated. More recently, sex differences in the strength of visual biases for weapons have been observed, with men exhibiting stronger biases than do women. In the current study we further explored this sex difference, by examining how immediate vicarious experience with weapons (via playing a violent video game compared to playing a non-violent video game) affected the visual attention for weapons. We found that the basic visual bias for weapons compared to non-weapons was replicated, as was the sex difference in the strength of this bias. We also observed that the context produced by playing a violent video game prior to the visual search task, produced some sex differences in responding that were not present after playing the nonviolent video game, providing modest evidence that men may be more prone to cognitive behavioural effects of violent video game play. Interestingly, there was some evidence that both sexes de-prioritised non-weapons during search after playing the violent, relative to the non-violent, video game. We recommend that future studies investigate the task dynamics that may have led to this effect.

Sclera color in humans facilitates gaze perception during daytime and nighttime

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2021
PLOS ONE

Species vary widely in the conspicuousness of their eye morphology and this could influence gaze perception. Eyes with conspicuous morphology can enhance gaze perception while eyes with camouflaged morphology may hinder gaze perception. While evidence suggests that conspicuous eye morphology enhances gaze perception, little is known about how environmental conditions affect this interaction. Thus, we investigated whether environmental light conditions affect gaze perception. Human subjects (Homo sapiens) were instructed to find direct-gaze faces within arrays of averted-gaze faces or to find averted-gaze faces within arrays of directed-gaze faces. The faces were displayed under conditions simulating nighttime or daytime conditions. Furthermore, the faces had naturally-colored sclera (white) or modified sclera (same color as the iris). Participants were fastest and most accurate in detecting faces during the daytime and nighttime conditions when the sclera were naturally-colored. Participants were worst at detecting faces with modified sclera during the nighttime conditions. These results suggest that eyes with conspicuous morphology enhance gaze perception during both daytime and nighttime conditions.

Exploring Parent-Child Conversations about Live Snakes and Spiders: Implications for the Development of Animal Fears

Article

Feb 2021

Snakes and spiders commonly elicit fear. However, despite the pervasiveness of these fears in adulthood, little is known about how they develop in early childhood. Informal learning environments, like zoos, allow for observation of parent-child conversations about these animals. Such naturalistic conversations may contain negative talk and may be one mechanism for the development of fears. In Study 1, we interviewed 241 preschool-aged children about snakes and spiders. In Study 2, 15 parent-child conversations were observed at a zoo. Across studies, we found that participants provided less positive (Study 2) and more negative (Study 1) information about snakes and spiders than other animals, and that children reported more fear (Study 1). Our results highlight the availability of negative information about snakes and spiders, and we discuss how we can use children's early experiences in informal learning settings to teach them about animals without contributing to the development of early fears.

Sclera color enhances gaze perception in humans

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2020
PLOS ONE

Gaze perception is an essential behavior that allows individuals to determine where others are directing their attention but we know relatively little about the ways in which eye morphology influences it. We therefore tested whether eyes with conspicuous morphology have evolved to facilitate gaze perception. During a visual search task, we recorded the eye movements of human participants (Homo sapiens) as they searched for faces with directed gaze within arrays of faces with averted gaze or the reverse; the faces were large and upright, small and upright, or large and inverted. The faces had sclera that were conspicuous (white or colored lighter than the iris color) or inconspicuous (colored the same or darker than the iris color). We found that participants were fastest and most accurate in finding the faces with conspicuous sclera versus inconspicuous sclera. Our results demonstrate that eyes with conspicuous morphology facilitate gaze perception in humans.

Human and Algorithmic Contributions to Misinformation Online - Identifying the Culprit

Chapter

Jan 2020
Lect Notes Comput Sci

André Calero Valdez

In times of massive fake news campaigns in social media, one may ask who is to blame for the spread of misinformation online. Are humans, in their limited capacity for rational self-reflection or responsible information use, guilty because they are the ones falling for the misinformation? Or are algorithms that provide the basis for filter bubble phenomena the cause of the rise of misinformation in particular in the political public discourse? In this paper, we look at both perspectives and see how both sides contribute to the problem of misinformation and how underlying metrics shape the problem.

The importance of using multiple outcome measures in infant research

Article

Jun 2020

Collecting data with infants is notoriously difficult. As a result, many of our studies consist of small samples, with only a single measure, in a single age group, at a single time point. With renewed calls for greater academic rigor in data collection practices, using multiple outcome measures in infant research is one way to increase rigor, and at the same time, enable us to more accurately interpret our data. Here, we illustrate the importance of using multiple measures in psychological research with examples from our own work on rapid threat detection, and from the broader infancy literature. First, we describe our initial studies using a single outcome measure, and how this strategy caused us to nearly miss a rich and complex story about attention biases for threat and their development. We demonstrate how using converging measures can help researchers make inferences about infant behavior, and how using additional measures allows us to more deeply examine the mechanisms that drive developmental change. Finally, we provide practical and statistical recommendations for how researchers can use multiple measures in future work.

Attentional bias towards threatening visual stimuli in a virtual reality-based visual search task

Preprint

Full-text available

Sep 2018

it a piece of work we had conducted to examine attentional negative bias in threatening-related search

Attention biases and social-emotional development in preschool-aged children who have been exposed to domestic violence

Article

Mar 2019
CHILD ABUSE NEGLECT

Background: School-aged children and adolescents exposed to domestic violence (DV) disproportionality attend to threatening and sad cues in their environment. This bias in attention has been found to predict elevations in symptoms of psychopathology. Studies have yet to explore attention biases using eyetracking technology in preschool-aged children with DV exposure. Objective: This study investigated whether preschool-aged children exposed to DV show vigilance to angry and sad faces versus happy faces and a target non-face stimulus relative to non-exposed children, and whether such vigilance relates to child social-emotional development. Participants and setting: Preschool-aged children were recruited from a large, diverse, urban community. DV-exposed children were recruited from a dyadic, mother-child treatment group specifically designed for, and restricted to, mothers who have experienced domestic violence (DV-exposed group, n = 23). Children with no prior exposure to DV and their mothers were recruited within the same community (non-exposed group, n = 32). Methods: Children completed an eye-tracking task to assess their attention to face stimuli and mothers rated their children's social-emotional development. Total duration of fixations were analyzed. Results: Results showed that DV-exposed children have a significantly stronger attention bias away from sad faces (p = 0.03; d = 0.62) and neutral faces (p = 0.02; d = 0.70) relative to non-exposed children, and this attention bias away from sad and neutral faces is associated with child social-emotional problems. Contrary to our hypothesis, no bias towards anger was found for DV-exposed versus non-exposed children. Conclusions: This study contributes to growing evidence that young children's negative attention biases influence functioning and have important implications for children's well-being and development.

Is threat recognition special? Resistance of threat recognition to perceptual noise

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2018

Magdalena Ewa Król

Perception takes into account the costs and benefits of possible interpretations of incoming sensory data. This should be especially pertinent for threat recognition, where minimising the costs associated with missing a real threat is of primary importance. We tested whether recognition of threats has special characteristics that adapt this process to the task it fulfils. Participants were presented with images of threats and visually matched neutral stimuli, distorted by varying levels of noise. We found threat superiority effect and liberal response bias. Moreover, increasing the level of noise degraded the recognition of the neutral images to higher extent than the threatening images. To summarise, recognising threats is special, in that it is more resistant to noise and decline in stimulus quality, suggesting that threat recognition is a fast ‘all or nothing’ process, in which threat presence is either confirmed or negated.

Memory (Mis)Matches: Accurate and Biased Recall of Terror Suspects

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2019

Miriam Lindner

Evolutionary psychologists suggest that memory retention is enhanced for fitness-relevant stimuli, a notion commonly referred to as adaptive memory. Since intergroup conflict has been—and continues to be—associated with grave costs to our species, human beings should be more vigilant to coalitional threat cues. This study tests the assumption that recognition memory is enhanced for coalitional threat cues in the domain of terrorist violence. In a survey experiment on a nationally representative sample of 1473 white, American adults, participants were exposed to eight experimental vignettes including subtle coalitional threat cues pertaining to terror-suspect sex, ethnicity, and coalition size. The results suggest that male outgroup coalitions are associated with enhanced recognition memory. Further, those who failed to correctly recognize the threat cues exhibited tendencies for bias. Specifically, and in line with error management theory, participants who were exposed to female terror suspects, ingroup perpetrators, and individual perpetrators were more likely to commit false positive errors. Overall, these findings speak to our coalitional psychology, which continues to factor into intuitions about mass violence today. Not only do people seem more alert to cues implying coalitional aggression—associated biases might also reduce or distort the attention that threats from female suspects, lone wolves, and ingroup attackers receive at the level of public debate.

First-graders’ allocation of attentional resources in an emotional Stroop task: The role of heart period variability and classroom climate

Article

Jun 2018

Background: Children's ability to remain focused on a task despite the presence of emotionally salient distractors in the environment is crucial for successful learning and academic performance. Aims: This study investigated first-graders' allocation of attentional resources in the presence of distracting emotional, school-related social interaction stimuli. Moreover, we examined whether such attentional processes were influenced by students' self-regulation, as indexed by heart period variability, observed classroom climate, or their interaction. Sample: Seventy-two-first graders took part in the study. Methods: To assess allocation of attentional resources, students' reaction times on an emotional Stroop task were registered by recording response times to colour frames placed around pictures of distracting emotional, school-related social interaction stimuli (i.e., emotional interference index). Moreover, heart period variability was measured by recording children's electrocardiogram at rest during an individual session, whereas classroom climate was observed during class activities by a trained researcher. Results: Images representing negative social interactions required greater attentional resources than images depicting positive ones. Heart period variability and classroom climate were each significantly and independently associated with the emotional interference index. A significant interaction also emerged, indicating that among children experiencing a negative classroom climate, those who had a higher basal heart period variability (higher self-regulation) were less distracted by negative emotional material and remained more focused on a task compared to those with lower heart period variability (lower self-regulation). Conclusions: Negative interactions require greater attentional resources than positive scenes. Moreover, with a negative classroom climate, higher basal heart period variability is a protective factor. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Attentional bias towards threatening visual stimuli in a virtual reality-based visual search task

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2018
Acta Psychol Sin

Ever since Öhman, Flykt and Esteves published their classic study in 2001, many researchers have replicated their findings regarding attentional bias to threatening stimuli in visual perception research. Based on these findings, psychologists proposed a promising theory called predatory fear, in which the attentional bias to threatening animals is interpreted as evolutionarily adaptive behavior of early mammals and the ancestors of modern humans. However, from an evolutionary perspective, the lack of ecological validity of existing experiments inevitably attenuated the interpretation. The present study aimed to fill the gaps by repeating the classic work in a virtual reality environment. A virtual reality grove was created with the Virtools virtual reality engine, in which jungles, trees, flowers, and weeds were arranged in the form of a wild grass field. The virtual reality grove was presented with an Oculus Rift DK 2 helmet. Forty participants were instructed to navigate along a path in the grove and search for threatening or non-threatening target stimuli. 3D models of a snake, a spider, a flower, a mushroom, a cicada, and a squirrel were used as stimuli in the search task, among which snake and spider were considered threatening stimuli. All the stimuli were shown in yellow and were assessed by twenty participants not included in the forty participants in search task to ensure they were of similar salience. To examine attentional bias to threatening stimuli, two experiments were conducted in the same visual search task as reported by Öhman et al. In Experiment 1, as in Öhman et al., the snake or the spider was selected as a target stimulus, and thirteen copies of the flower or the mushroom were used as distracting stimuli, or other combinations of these. Twenty participants were individually presented with the virtual grove and instructed to passively wander along the path in the jungle to search for target stimuli. A fixed camera was set at a uniform speed to simulate the navigation in visual search task. Given that searching for animals took less time than searching for plants (Soares et al, 2009), flowers and mushrooms were replaced with cicadas and squirrels in Experiment 2. The other twenty participants repeated the experiment procedure. In addition to response time (RT), response distance (RD) was also computed as a compensatory index. In Experiment 1, the results of RTs revealed that the searching for threatening stimuli (snake and spider) is faster than searching for non-threatening stimuli (mushroom, flower). The RD values showed that participants found the threatening stimuli when they were farther away than the non-threatening stimuli. In Experiment 2, the same results were found even when the distracting stimuli were all animals. The RTs and RDs both confirmed that participants were better at finding snakes and spiders than finding flowers, mushrooms, cicadas, and squirrels. The total results supported the hypothesis of predatory fear was relatively soundly and the attentional bias to threatening animals, especially snake and spider, was found to be likely to be caused by predatory fear as part of human cognition. These findings provide new evidence for the hypothesis of predatory fear from an evolutionary perspective. In addition, virtual reality was proven to be a suitable technique for assessing the ecological validity of psychological experiments.

Perceptual Decision-Making Regarding Phylogenetically Salient Stimuli

Article

Sep 2024

Phylogenetically salient stimuli such as spiders are commonly reported threats in the general population and the most common object of specific phobias in clinical populations. Several theories have hypothesized that our perceptual systems prioritize such stimuli in an “automatic” or “bottom-up” manner due to their evolutionary salience. However, empirical research on the perceptual processing of these stimuli as well as the influence of “top-down” goal-driven and bottom-up stimulus-driven factors is lacking. Here, we used perceptual psychophysics to determine absolute perceptual thresholds for the detection of spider and crab images. Subsequently, participants used spider and crab cues (that imposed a top-down perceptual set) to detect spiders and crab images presented at their predetermined perceptual threshold in a two-alternative forced-choice perceptual decision-making task. While spiders were detected at lower perceptual thresholds than crabs, they were not immune to top-down influence. Indeed, compared to top-down crab cues, spider cues improved the speed and accuracy of detection of spiders vs crabs. Using a hierarchical drift diffusion model, we found that spider cues biased decision-making not only by shifting the starting point of evidence accumulation towards the spider decision, but also by increasing the efficiency with which sensory evidence accumulated, more so for spider than crab perceptual decisions. Overall, these findings provide evidence for the perceptual prioritization of phylogenetically salient stimuli and highlight the computational mechanisms by which this prioritization is facilitated by bottom-up and top-down factors.

Predators as Attention-Grabbing

Chapter

Apr 2021

Fears and Phobias

Chapter

Apr 2021

Evolutionary Developmental Psychology: Developing Adaptations in Infancy and Childhood

Chapter

Mar 2020

Fear in Development

Chapter

Jul 2019

Seeing Others Yawn Enhances the Detection of Spiders and Cockroaches

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2024

Yawning may serve as a cue that an individual is undergoing a downregulation of arousal and vigilance. Accordingly, the group vigilance theory posits that witnessing someone yawn should enhance the vigilance of the observer as a means of compensating for the reduced arousal and vigilance experienced by the yawner. This theory has gained empirical support from two recent studies, whereby exposure to yawning stimuli enhanced the detection of recurrent survival threats (e.g., snakes and lions) but did not alter the detection of comparable, nonthreatening stimuli (e.g., frogs and impala). The current study extends upon this line of research by examining how seeing other people yawn affects the detection of spiders and cockroaches. In a repeated-measures design, 30 participants completed a series of visual search tasks with spiders and cockroaches both following exposure to yawning and control videos. As expected, spiders were detected faster and elicited a greater number of fixations when presented as distractors. Moreover, following the observation of yawning videos, participants were faster at detecting both spiders and cockroaches and were less likely to fixate on distractor stimuli. These findings provide further evidence that seeing others yawn enhances the detection of fearful animals.

Medos, fobias e ansiedades elementos etiológicos e implicações terapêuticas

Book

Full-text available

Jan 2023

Carlos Coelho

A quantidade de variáveis implicadas na etiologia e manutenção de medos, fobias e ansiedades é vasta. Neste livro abordamos as respostas defensivas, o medo e a ansiedade nas suas dimensões social, política, antropológica e religiosa. A predisposição biológica para temermos certas configurações de estímulos, e a ativação fisiológica e neuroendócrina que suporta as respostas defensivas bem como a expressão genética necessária para a criação de uma memória a longo prazo do evento. Abordamos ainda o papel de acontecimentos traumáticos, evitamento, alarmes falsos, vieses cognitivos, insight e psicoterapia, bem como os subtipos de medo e propostas de alteração da sua nosologia. Abordamos ainda a dimensão histórica do conceito de medo, autores seminais, a revolução cognitiva e o papel importante dos estudos que usam a memória do medo para perceber como aprendemos coisas novas. Concluímos que o estudo dos elementos de um estímulo que podem ser geradores de medo (e.g., dentes num cão, a velocidade da sua aproximação ou o tamanho) pode ajudar a identificar sintomas anteriormente incompreendidos. Exploramos as formas de identificar estes elementos e o seu impacto no tratamento. Estes fatores etiológicos têm implicações na forma como aplicamos técnicas de exposição, que podem ser modificadas para atender a tendências específicas de resposta (e.g., “tremer os joelhos” em locais altos). Ao explorar os elementos específicos dos estímulos que causam medo, exploramos neste livro os seguintes: 1 Dor; 2 Repugnância, Contaminação e Nojo; 3 Resposta vasovagal; 4 Postura; 5 Movimento e velocidade; 6 Distância/tamanho; 7 Saliência, cor e visibilidade; 8 Configuração/forma; 9 Olfato e 10 Território. Esperamos que este livro vos encoraje a explorar o medo e ansiedade de forma detalhada e inovadora

An Evolutionary Approach to Horror Media

Chapter

Mar 2020

Is conscious awareness needed for fear extinction? "DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY" Beer-Sheva Is conscious awareness needed for fear extinction?

Thesis

Full-text available

Jul 2021

Specific Phobia: Etiological, Cognitive, and Neuroscientific Aspects

Chapter

Nov 2022

Marwa Azab

Specific phobia (SP) used to be called “simple phobia” in earlier editions of the DSM (Diagnostics and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). The chapter points out changes in defining criteria over the various DSM editions. Etiological factors including genetic and temperaments such as disgust sensitivity are discussed. Learning theory including associative and nonassociative models of specific phobia are examined. Cognitive biases that facilitate the maintenance of the disorder such as attentional and judgment biases are explained. The neural correlates of specific phobia are assessed based on functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging studies. Electrophysiological correlates are also reviewed including P1, N1, N2pc, P3, and LPP.

Do Humans Possess a Superior Location Memory for Snakes?

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2022

Andrew Gallup

Snakes have been a recurrent survival threat throughout human evolutionary history, and, as a result, these animals disproportionately induce attention and fear. Consistent with the predictions of Snake Detection Theory, a large body of literature has demonstrated that both humans and non-human primates possess visual adaptations for rapidly detecting snakes. The current research examined whether people also possess cognitive biases for remembering the locations of these dangerous animals. Three preregistered studies (N = 69), all of which used within-subjects designs with college students in the United States, were conducted to assess how the spatial recall for snakes compared to other recurrent survival threats: lions and spiders. Results show that the location memory for snakes was greater than for lions (p < .05) but equivalent to that of spiders. In addition, the findings indicate that differences in location memory across studies were driven primarily by threat rather than arousal and negative valence. Overall, these studies suggest that humans do not possess a superior location memory specific for snakes. Limitations to the current research and suggestions for future work in this area are discussed.

Fear Learning in Infancy: An Evolutionary Developmental Perspective

Chapter

Jan 2022

David H. Rakison

Fear is ubiquitous among humans and has an evolved function to generate physiological and behavioral responses to threats that were adaptive for our ancestors. In this chapter, I outline the three main theories of fear acquisition—the traditional, nonassociative, and prepared-learning models. I then summarize my theory of fear learning in infants for recurrent threat—a perceptual template that orients infants to recurrent threats and a rapid and privileged associative-learning mechanism—and review the experimental literature that supports this model. The experimental evidence described here offers strong support not only for the prepared-learning model but also for the notion that infants’ fear mechanism drives them to detect recurrent threats such as snakes and spiders and then learn the appropriate emotional response to them. Limitations and future directions of fear learning research are also discussed.

Specificity of spiders among fear- and disgust-eliciting arthropods: Spiders are special, but phobics not so much

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2021
PLOS ONE

To investigate a specificity of spiders as a prototypical fear- and disgust-eliciting stimuli, we conducted an online experiment. The respondents rated images of 25 spiders, 12 non-spider chelicerates, and 10 other arthropods on a fear and disgust 7-point scale. The evaluation of 968 Central European respondents confirmed the specificity of spiders among fear- and disgust-eliciting arthropods and supported the notion of spiders as a cognitive category. We delineated this category as covering extant spider species as well as some other chelicerates bearing a physical resemblance to spiders, mainly whip spiders and camel spiders. We suggested calling this category the spider-like cognitive category. We discussed evolutionary roots of the spider-like category and concluded that its roots should be sought in fear, with disgust being secondary of the two emotions. We suggested other chelicerates, e.g., scorpions, might have been important in formation and fixation of the spider-like category. Further, we investigated an effect of respondent’s sensitivity to a specific fear of spiders on evaluation of the stimuli. We found that suspected phobic respondents were in their rating nearly identical to those with only high fear of spiders and similar to those with only moderate fear of spiders. We concluded that results based on healthy respondents with elevated fear should also be considered relevant for arachnophobia research.

Are natural threats superior threats?

Article

Aug 2021
EVOL HUM BEHAV

Danielle Sulikowski

Threat superiority effects describe the reaction time advantage for locating threatening objects in a visual search paradigm, compared to locating visually similar non-threatening objects. They are widely reported for threats of both natural (snakes and spiders) and man-made (guns and knives) origins. Across two experiments, the current study contrasts threat superiority effects for natural and man-made targets. When targets are not depicted held, snakes and spiders tended to exhibit larger threat superiority effects, and were searched for with additional caution, than were guns and knives. When snakes and spiders were depicted held and weapons wielded, systematic differences between the natural and man-made threats disappeared. This means the advantage for threats of natural origin observed when all targets were depicted not held may be attributable to differences in animation snakes and spiders are alive and may strike at any time if in your vicinity, whereas a weapon can only inflict harm if wielded. From these data there is no evidence that evolved visual sensitivities to the basic shapes of venomous animals support faster detection and response times to these animals than can occur to targets such as guns and knives, whose shapes must be learned. The selection pressures that led to the evolution of such sensitivities (observable even in infancy) may therefore lie in protecting young children and babies from envenomation, before they even have the cognitive capacity to understand the dangers that snakes and spiders pose.

Psychometric properties of threat‐related attentional bias in young children using eye‐tracking

Article

Nov 2020

Anxiety is one of the most common forms of child psychopathology associated with persistent impairment across the lifespan. Therefore, investigating mechanisms that underlie anxiety in early childhood may improve prevention and intervention efforts. Researchers have linked selective attention toward threat (i.e., attentional bias to threat) with the development of anxiety. However, previous work on attentional bias has used less reliable, reaction time (RT)‐based measures of attention. Additionally, few studies have used eye‐tracking to measure attentional bias in young children. In the present study, we investigated the psychometric properties of an eye‐tracking measure of attentional bias in a sample of young children between 6‐ and 9‐years‐old and explored if trait and clinical anxiety were related to attentional biases to threat. Results showed good psychometric properties for threat and neutral attentional biases, comparable to those found in adult eye‐tracking studies. Temperamental and clinical anxiety did not significantly relate to threat/neutral dwell time and attentional biases. The significance of these null findings was discussed in relation to existing developmental theories of attentional biases. Future studies should explore if temperamental or clinical anxiety prospectively predict threat attentional bias and the onset of anxiety in older children using a longitudinal design.

Evolutionary developmental psychology.

Chapter

Full-text available

Jan 2002

From foods to artifacts: Children’s evaluative and taxonomic categorization across multiple domains

Article

Oct 2020
COGNITIVE DEV

Simone P. Nguyen

In previous research, the domain of food has been the main test case for examining children’s use of evaluation as a basis for conceptual organization. The present research investigates how children’s evaluative category representation of foods compare to the domains of animals, artifacts, plants, and people. Three studies were conducted with children (N = 176, range = 3;22 – 8;78 years) involving categorization tasks. Results reveal domain similarity in younger and older children’s developing ability for evaluative categorization. Results also demonstrate domain differences in younger and older children’s tendency to categorize based on evaluative versus taxonomic relations. Applications of these findings are discussed within the context of methods to enhance children’s healthy food choices and consumption.

Do Snakes Draw Attention More Strongly than Spiders or Other Animals?

Chapter

Sep 2019

Nobuyuki Kawai

Adults detect pictures of snakes and spiders more quickly than pictures of mushrooms or flowers. The same holds true for pictures of fear-irrelevant animals which are detected more quickly than pictures of non-animal objects, however pictures of fear-relevant animals (i.e., snakes and spiders) are detected more quickly than are pictures of fear-irrelevant animals (such as birds and fish). In addition, fear-relevant animals (i.e., snakes and spiders) draw attention more strongly than do fear-irrelevant but repulsive animals (such as lizards and cockroaches). These results substantiate the fear module theory (Öhman and Mineka, Psychol Rev 108:483–522, 2001). However, recent studies have shown that spiders do not draw attention as strongly as do snakes. We conducted visual search tasks in which fear-relevant (snakes or spiders) and fear-irrelevant stimuli (Experiment 1, flowers or mushrooms; Experiment 2, koalas or birds) were presented as both target stimuli and distractors (Shibasaki and Kawai 2011). Snakes captured attention more than spiders did when snakes were target stimuli, while snakes held attention more strongly than spiders did when snakes were distractors. A series of studies investigating the attention-drawing power of snakes and spiders under conditions of greater perceptual load indicated that while snakes automatically drew attention even under high perceptual load, the same was not true for spiders. In a visual search study we conducted using monkeys, we found that while snakes were detected among fear-irrelevant animals (koalas) more quickly than vice versa, the time required to detect spiders among koalas was about the same (i.e., was not faster) than the time required for the reverse. These results deviate from the original fear module theory and instead are consistent with the snake detection theory (SDT), which holds that snakes are the only animals that have always been feared by humans and primates.

Are Snakes Special in Human Fear Learning and Cognition? The Preparedness Theory of Phobia and the Fear Module Theory

Chapter

Sep 2019

Nobuyuki Kawai

The preparedness theory of phobias hypothesizes that certain associations tend not to form because the particular combination of stimulus and response was not “prepared” in the process of evolution. In this chapter, I will discuss subsequent theoretical developments as well as related experimental results. Specifically, in this chapter I will give an overview of the fact that, with regard to biological fear-related stimuli in classical conditioning of fear in people, (1) conditioning is quick, (2) there is high resistance to extinction, (3) associative learning is established even when the stimuli are subconscious, and (4) there are illusory correlations between stimuli and aversion.

Fear in Infancy: Lessons From Snakes, Spiders, Heights, and Strangers

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2019

This review challenges the traditional interpretation of infants' and young children's responses to three types of potentially "fear-inducing" stimuli-snakes and spiders, heights, and strangers. The traditional account is that these stimuli are the objects of infants' earliest developing fears. We present evidence against the traditional account, and provide an alternative explanation of infants' behaviors toward each stimulus. Specifically, we propose that behaviors typically interpreted as "fearful" really reflect an array of stimulus-specific responses that are highly dependent on context, learning, and the perceptual features of the stimuli. We speculate about why researchers so commonly misinterpret these behaviors, and conclude with future directions for studying the development of fear in infants and young children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

What drives prioritized visual processing? A motivational relevance account

Chapter

May 2019
Progr Brain Res

Emotion is fundamental to our being, and an essential aspect guiding behavior when rapid responding is required. This includes whether we approach or avoid a stimulus, and the accompanying physiological responses. A common tenet is that threat-related content drives stimulus processing and biases visual attention, so that rapid responding can be initiated. In this paper, it will be argued instead that prioritization of threatening stimuli should be encompassed within a motivational relevance framework. To more fully understand what is, or is not, prioritized for visual processing one must, however, additionally consider: (i)stimulus ambiguity and perceptual saliency; (ii)task demands, including both perceptual load and cognitive load; and (iii)endogenous/affective states of the individual. Combined with motivational relevance, this then leads to a multifactorial approach to understanding the drivers of prioritized visual processing. This accords with current recognition that the brain basis allowing for visual prioritization is also multifactorial, including transient, dynamic and overlapping networks. Taken together, the paper provides a reconceptualization of how “emotional” information prioritizes visual processing.

Emoce vyvolané zvířaty II: strach a odpor

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2018

Animals represent prioritised stimuli for humans, they are given more attention than inanimate objects, and this attention is accompanied by not only positive emotions, but also negative ones, such as fear and disgust. Both of these emotions play an important adaptive role in potentially dangerous situations. Fear represents human reaction to the presence of a predator or another fear-inducing stimulus posing an immediate threat, while disgust has evolved as a protection against diseases and infections. These emotions were significant during human evolutionary history, but they continue to influence us to this day, despite humans coming into contact with animals in the wild with increasing rarity. Fear and disgust are also a substantial part of animal phobias. This work summarises our findings so far regarding negative emotions caused by animals. It deals with differences between the function of fear and disgust, their relation to each other, and their psychopathologies. Last but not least, it also discusses which specific features of animals influence their prioritized perception and experiencing of fear and disgust evoked by distinct animal groups.

The seeds of social learning: Infants exhibit more social looking for plants than other object types

Article

Feb 2019
COGNITION

Infants must negotiate encounters with a wide variety of different entities over the course of the first few years of life, yet investigations of their social referencing behavior have largely focused on a limited set of objects and situations such as unfamiliar toys and the visual cliff. Here we examine whether infants' social looking strategies differ when they are confronted with plants. Plants have been fundamental to human life throughout our evolutionary history, and learning about which plants are beneficial and which are dangerous is a task that, for humans, cannot be achieved alone. Using an object exploration paradigm, we found that 8- to 18-month-old infants exhibited more social looking toward adults when confronted with plants compared to other object types. Further, this increased social looking occurred when infants first encountered plants, in the time before touching them. This social looking strategy puts infants in the best position to glean information from others before making contact with potentially dangerous plants. These findings provide a new lens through which to view infants' social information seeking behavior.

Studying Biases in Visualization Research: Framework and Methods

Chapter

Sep 2018

In this chapter, we propose and discuss a lightweight framework to help organize research questions that arise around biases in visualization and visual analysis. We contrast our framework against the cognitive bias codex by Buster Benson. The framework is inspired by Norman’s Human Action Cycle and classifies biases into three levels: perceptual biases, action biases, and social biases. For each of the levels of cognitive processing, we discuss examples of biases from the cognitive science literature and speculate how they might also be important to the area of visualization. In addition, we put forward a methodological discussion on how biases might be studied on all three levels, and which pitfalls and threats to validity exist. We hope that the framework will help spark new ideas and guide researchers that study the important topic of biases in visualization.

Emotion Drives Attention: Detecting the Snake in the Grass

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2001

Participants searched for discrepant fear-relevant pictures (snakes or spiders) in grid-pattern arrays of fear-irrelevant pictures belonging to the same category (flowers or mushrooms) and vice versa. Fear-relevant pictures were found more quickly than fear-irrelevant ones. Fear-relevant, but not fear-irrelevant, search was unaffected by the location of the target in the display and by the number of distractors, which suggests parallel search for fear-relevant targets and serial search for fear-irrelevant targets. Participants specifically fearful of snakes but not spiders (or vice versa) showed facilitated search for the feared objects but did not differ from controls in search for nonfeared fear-relevant or fear-irrelevant, targets. Thus, evolutionary relevant threatening stimuli were effective in capturing attention, and this effect was further facilitated if the stimulus was emotionally provocative.

Fears, Phobias, and Preparedness: Toward an Evolved Module of Fear and Fear Learning

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2001

An evolved module for fear elicitation and fear learning with 4 characteristics is proposed. (a) The fear module is preferentially activated in aversive contexts by stimuli that are fear relevant in an evolutionary perspective. (b) Its activation to such stimuli is automatic. (c) It is relatively impenetrable to cognitive control. (d) It originates in a dedicated neural circuitry, centered on the amygdala. Evidence supporting these propositions is reviewed from conditioning studies, both in humans and in monkeys; illusory correlation studies; studies using unreportable stimuli; and studies from animal neuroscience. The fear module is assumed to mediate an emotional level of fear learning that is relatively independent and dissociable from cognitive learning of stimulus relationships.

On the Generality of the Law of Learning

Article

Full-text available

Sep 1970

Martin E. P. Seligman

That all events are equally associable and obey common laws is a central assumption of general process learning theory. A continuum of preparedness is defined which holds that organisms are prepared to associate certain events, unprepared for some, and contraprepared for others. A review of data from the traditional learning paradigms shows that the assumption of equivalent associability is false. Examples from experiments in classical conditioning, instrumental training, discrimination training, and avoidance training support the assumption. Language acquisition and the functional autonomy of motives are also viewed using the preparedness continuum. It is speculated that the laws of learning themselves may vary with the preparedness of the organism for the association and that different physiological and cognitive mechanisms may covary with the dimension. (2 p. ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

The role of the vomeronasal organ of crotalines (Reptilia: Serpentes: Viperidae) in predator detection

Article

Full-text available

Aug 1999

Most reptiles and mammals, with the exceptions of crocodilians, aquatic mammals and some primates, have a functional vomeronasal organ that detects and perceives semi-volatile chemicals in the environment. This organ is used in detection of prey and is also important for recognition of conspecifics and potential predators. We tested eight species of North American pit vipers for behavioural responses to an ophiophagous (snake-eating) predator, the common kingsnake, Lampropeltis getula . Kingsnakes have a substance in their skin that is recognized by crotalines, which react with a series of defensive responses including, but not limited to, avoidance, fleeing, body bridging and head hiding. The vomeronasal duct of the pit vipers was sutured closed to determine the role of this organ in detection of kingsnakes. Pit vipers with intact and sutured vomeronasal ducts were tested in a neutral cage with a kingsnake and monitored for behavioural responses. Results demonstrated that the vomeronasal organ is important in the recognition of kingsnakes by pit vipers and raises doubts that any other sense plays a major role in this behaviour.

Superior detection of threat-relevant stimuli in infancy

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2010
DEVELOPMENTAL SCI

The ability to quickly detect potential threat is an important survival mechanism for humans and other animals. Past research has established that adults have an attentional bias for the detection of threat-relevant stimuli, including snakes and spiders as well as angry human faces. Recent studies have documented that preschool children also detect the presence of threatening stimuli more quickly than various non-threatening stimuli. Here we report the first evidence that this attentional bias is present even in infancy. In two experiments, 8- to 14-month-old infants responded more rapidly to snakes than to flowers and more rapidly to angry than to happy faces. These data provide the first evidence of enhanced visual detection of threat-relevant stimuli in infants and hence offer especially strong support for the existence of a general bias for the detection of threat in humans.

The narrow fellow in the grass: Human infants associate snakes and fear

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2009
DEVELOPMENTAL SCI

Why are snakes such a common target of fear? One current view is that snake fear is one of several innate fears that emerge spontaneously. Another is that humans have an evolved predisposition to learn to fear snakes. In the first study reported here, 9- to 10-month-old infants showed no differential spontaneous reaction to films of snakes versus other animals. In the second study, 7- to 18-month-old infants associated snakes with fear: As predicted, they looked longer at films of snakes while listening to a frightened human voice than while listening to a happy voice. In the third study, infants did not look differentially to still photos of snakes and other animals, indicating that movement is crucial to infants' association of snakes with fear. These results offer support for the view that humans have a natural tendency to selectively associate snakes with fear.

Finding the Face in the Crowd: An Anger Superiority Effect

Article

Full-text available

Jun 1988

Facial gestures have been given an increasingly critical role in models of emotion. The biological significance of interindividual transmission of emotional signals is a pivotal assumption for placing the face in a central position in these models. This assumption invited a logical corollary, examined in this article: Face-processing should be highly efficient. Three experiments documented an asymmetry in the processing of emotionally discrepant faces embedded in crowds. The results suggested that threatening faces pop out of crowds, perhaps as a result of a preattentive, parallel search for signals of direct threat.

Gender and age differences in the prevalence of specific fears and phobias

Article

Full-text available

Feb 1996
BEHAV RES THER

Point prevalence of specific fears and phobias was determined in 704 respondents of 1000 randomly selected adults aged 18-70 yr. A phobia for lightning, enclosed spaces, darkness, flying, heights, spiders, snakes, injections, dentists and/or injuries was defined if subjects reported a fear that was out of conscious control, interfered with life and lead to the avoidance of the feared object [American Psychiatric Association, 1994. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th edn). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press.] Fear intensity was assessed using visual analogue scales. A factor analysis generally supported the classification of fears and phobias into: (1) situational phobias (lightning, enclosed spaces, darkness, flying and heights); (2) animal phobias (spiders and snakes); and (3) mutilation phobias (injections, dentists, injuries). Total point prevalence of any specific phobia was 19.9% (26.5% for females and 12.4% for males). In total, 21.2% women and 10.9% men met criterias for any single specific phobia. Multiple phobias was reported by 5.4% of the females and 1.5% of the males. Animal phobia had a prevalence of 12.1% in women and 3.3% in men. Point prevalence of situational phobia was 17.4% in women and 8.5% in men. For mutilation phobia no gender difference was observed, being presented in 3.2% of the women and 2.7% of the men. Women as compared to men gave higher fear ratings for all objects and situations. Inanimate object fears and phobias were more common in older than younger individuals. Animal fears were more intense in younger than in older individuals. Fear of flying increased and fear of injections decreased as a function of age in women but not in men. Thus, specific fears and phobias are heterogeneous with respect to sex and age distribution.

The Face in the Crowd Revisited: A Threat Advantage With Schematic Stimuli

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2001

Schematic threatening, friendly, and neutral faces were used to test the hypothesis that humans preferentially orient their attention toward threat. Using a visual search paradigm, participants searched for discrepant faces in matrices of otherwise identical faces. Across 5 experiments, results consistently showed faster and more accurate detection of threatening than friendly targets. The threat advantage was obvious regardless of whether the conditions favored parallel or serial search (i.e., involved neutral or emotional distractors), and it was valid for inverted faces. Threatening angry faces were more quickly and accurately detected than were other negative faces (sad or "scheming"), which suggests that the threat advantage can be attributed to threat rather than to the negative valence or the uniqueness of the target display.

Emotion Drives Attention: Detecting the Snake in the Grass

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2001

Searching for threat

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2002

In a series of experiments, a visual search task was used to test the idea that biologically relevant threatening stimuli might be recognized very quickly or capture visuo-spatial attention. In Experiment 1, there was evidence for both faster detection and faster search rates for threatening animals than for plants. However, examination of the basis of this effect in Experiment 2 showed that it was not due to threat per se, as detection and search rate advantages were found for pleasant rather than threatening animals compared to plants. In Experiment 3, participants searched for the plants and pleasant and threatening animals used in Experiments 1 and 2, among a fixed heterogeneous selection of non-target items. There was no search rate or detection advantage for threatening animals compared to pleasant animals or plants. The same targets and non-targets as those used in Experiment 3 were also used in Experiment 4. In Experiment 4, participants searched for targets that were presented either close to or distant from an initial fixation point. There was no evidence for a "threat" detection advantage either close to or distant from the cross. Finally, an experiment was conducted in which target categories (fruit, flowers, and animals) were not pre-specified prior to each trial block. There were no differences in reaction times to detect pleasant animals, threatening animals, or fruit. We conclude that the visual search paradigm does not readily reveal any biases that might exist for threatening stimuli in the general population.

Snakes and Cats in the Flower Bed: Fast Detection Is Not Specific to Pictures of Fear-Relevant Animals

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2004

The observation that snakes and spiders are found faster among flowers and mushrooms than vice versa and that this search advantage is independent of set size supports the notion that fear-relevant stimuli are processed preferentially in a dedicated fear module. Experiment 1 replicated the faster identification of snakes and spiders but also found a set size effect in a blocked, but not in a mixed-trial, sequence. Experiment 2 failed to find faster identification of snake and spider deviants relative to other animals among flowers and mushrooms and provided evidence for a search advantage for pictures of animals, irrespective of their fear relevance. These findings suggest that results from the present visual search task cannot support the notion of preferential processing of fear relevance.

The Role of Fear-Relevant Stimuli in Visual Search: A Comparison of Phylogenetic and Ontogenetic Stimuli

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2005

It has been argued that phylogenetic fear-relevant stimuli elicit preattentive capture of attention. To distinguish between fear relevance and time of appearance in evolutionary history, the authors compare phylogenetic and ontogenetic fear-relevant and fear-irrelevant stimuli in a visual search task. The authors found no evidence for a special role of phylogenetic fear-relevant stimuli; it seems that fear relevance in general is more important than is the evolutionary age. The pattern of results indicates that attention toward threatening stimuli is mainly affected by a late component that prolongs the disengagement of attention.

Visual Search With Biological Threat Stimuli: Accuracy, Reaction Times, and Heart Rate Changes

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2005

Anders Flykt

Twenty-four participants were given a visual search task of deciding whether all the pictures in 3 x 3 search arrays contained a target picture from a deviant category, and heart rate was measured. The categories were snakes, spiders, flowers, and mushrooms. Shorter reaction times (RTs) were observed for fear-relevant (snake and spider) targets rather than for fear-irrelevant/neutral (flower and mushroom) targets. This difference was most pronounced for the participants presented with a gray-scale version of the search arrays. The 1st interbeat interval (IBI), after the search array onset, showed an effect of the target, whereas the 2nd IBI also showed an effect of the distractors. The results suggest that controlled processing of the task operates together with automatic processing.

Detecting the Snake in the Grass: Attention to Fear-Relevant Stimuli by Adults and Young Children

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2008

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.

The use of chemical cues in predator recognition by western toad tadpoles

Article

Jan 1996

The use of chemical cues in predator recognition by western toad tadpoles

Article

Dec 1996

Western toad,Bufo boreas, tadpoles were collected from a lake in the Cascade Mountains of central Oregon, where they occur in sympatry with backswimmers,Notonectaspp., giant waterbugs,Lethocerus americanus, common garter snakes,Thamnophis sirtalis, roughskin newts,Taricha granulosaand rainbow trout,Oncorhynchus mykiss. Backswimmers, waterbugs and snakes prey on toad tadpoles. Newts and trout are potential tadpole predators, but they find toad tadpoles unpalatable. In laboratory tests, groups of tadpoles responded with anti-predator behaviour when exposed to live backswimmers, waterbugs and snakes, but not when exposed to either newts or trout. In subsequent tests, when only chemical cues from the stimulus animals were presented, the toad tadpoles again responded to backswimmers, waterbugs and snakes, but not to either newts or trout. When tests were conducted using only visual cues, tadpoles did not respond with anti-predator behaviour to any of the heterospecifics with the possible exception of garter snakes. These results show that western toad tadpoles can distinguish between predatory and non-predatory heterospecifics with which they co-occur, and that predator recognition by toad tadpoles is primarily based on chemical cues.

Antipredator Defenses and the Persistence of Amphibian Larvae With Fishes

Article

Dec 1988

Larvae of 15 amphibian species were tested for 2 key defenses: unpalatability and chemically mediated predator avoidance. In 8 of 9 cases, larvae of species that often encounter fish had at least one of these defenses. Larvae of 7 species that breed in fishless pools consistently lacked defenses against fish. Lack of appropriate defenses appears to be a primary reason why temporary pool species cannot successfully coexist with predatory fishes in permanent habitats. Palatability and responses to chemical cues from fish often differed among closely related taxa and were correlated strongly with frequency of encounter with fish. Thus, natural selection rather than phylogeny best explains interspecific variation in antipredator defenses. Members of at least 2 orders and 4 families of amphibians use chemical cues to reduce predation risk from predatory fish. -from Authors

The Malicious SerpentSnakes as a Prototypical Stimulus for an Evolved Module of Fear

Article

Feb 2003

As reptiles, snakes may have signified deadly threats in the environment of early mammals. We review findings suggesting that snakes remain special stimuli for humans. Intense snake fear is prevalent in both humans and other primates. Humans and monkeys learn snake fear more easily than fear of most other stimuli through direct or vicarious conditioning. Neither the elicitation nor the conditioning of snake fear in humans requires that snakes be consciously perceived; rather, both processes can occur with masked stimuli. Humans tend to perceive illusory correlations between snakes and aversive stimuli, and their attention is automatically captured by snakes in complex visual displays. Together, these and other findings delineate an evolved fear module in the brain. This module is selectively and automatically activated by once-threatening stimuli, is relatively encapsulated from cognition, and derives from specialized neural circuitry.

Wall lizards combine chemical and visual cues of ambush snake predators to avoid overestimating risk inside refuges

Article

Apr 2004

The threat sensitivity hypothesis assumes that multiple cues from a predator should contribute in an additive way to determine the degree of risk-sensitive behaviour. The ability to use multiple cues in assessing the current level of predation risk should be especially important to prey exposed to multiple predators. Wall lizards, Podarcis muralis, respond to predatory attacks from birds or mammals by hiding inside rock crevices, where they may encounter another predator, the smooth snake, Coronella austriaca. We investigated in the laboratory whether chemical cues may be important to wall lizards for detection of snakes. The greater tongue-flick rate and shorter latency to first tongue-flick in response to predator scents indicated that lizards were able to detect the snakes' chemical cues. We also investigated the use of different predatory cues by lizards when detecting the presence of snakes within refuges. We simulated successive predator attacks and compared the propensity of lizards to enter the refuge and time spent within it for predator-free refuges, refuges containing either only visual or chemical cues of a snake, or a combination of these. The antipredatory response of lizards was greater when they were exposed to both visual and chemical cues than when only one cue was presented, supporting the threat sensitivity hypothesis. This ability may improve the accuracy of assessments of the current level of predation risk inside the refuge. It could be especially important in allowing lizards to cope with threats posed by two types of predators requiring conflicting prey defences.

Fear and anxiety as emotional phenomena: Clinical phenomenology, evolutionary perspectives, and information processing mechanisms

Article

Jan 1993

Arne Öhman

describe the emotional phenomena of fear and anxiety from a clinical perspective / review . . . psychophysiological findings, and [provide] an analysis of the stimulus contexts that set the stage for the phenomena of fear and anxiety / the issue here is whether there are several forms of anxiety and fear or whether different manifestations originate from a common source [discuss] theoretical structures that are needed to understand the phenomena of anxiety / the theoretical perspective derives from information-processing psychology emphasizing the nonconscious mechanisms . . . pivotal in understanding fear and anxiety / [discuss] some of the implications of this theoretical perspective / [this] perspective . . . views phobias and panic disorders as physiologically driven, and generalized anxiety disorder as a cognitively driven, with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at a somewhat intermediate position between the two groups (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

More than just another face in the crowd. Superior detection of threatening facial expression in children and adults

Article

Apr 2009
DEVELOPMENTAL SCI

Vanessa LoBue

Threatening facial expressions can signal the approach of someone or something potentially dangerous. Past research has established that adults have an attentional bias for angry faces, visually detecting their presence more quickly than happy or neutral faces. Two new findings are reported here. First, evidence is presented that young children share this attentional bias. In five experiments, young children and adults were asked to find a picture of a target face among an array of eight distracter faces. Both age groups detected threat-relevant faces--angry and frightened--more rapidly than non-threat-relevant faces (happy and sad). Second, evidence is presented that both adults and children have an attentional bias for negative stimuli overall. All negative faces were detected more quickly than positive ones in both age groups. As the first evidence that young children exhibit the same superior detection of threatening facial expressions as adults, this research provides important support for the existence of an evolved attentional bias for threatening stimuli.

The detection of certain predators via olfaction by small-mouthed salamander larvae (Ambystoma texanum)

Article

Aug 1988
Behav Neural Biol

Lee B. Kats

Larvae of the small-mouthed salamander (Ambystoma texanum) showed an increase in refuge use when exposed to chemical cues from a predaceous fish. The percentage of time spent outside of refuge was significantly reduced relative to controls when larvae were exposed to chemical cues from fish, but was not different from the controls when larvae were exposed to chemical cues from three other potential predators. A. texanum larvae responded to these chemical cues via olfaction. Larvae that had their external nares plugged with a gelatinous paste did not respond to fish cues, while sham-treated larvae showed an avoidance of fish cues.

Fears, Phobias, and Preparedness: Toward an Evolved Module of Fear and Fear Learning

Article

Aug 2001

Epidemiology of spider bites in Texas, 1998–2002

Article

Nov 2004
PUBLIC HEALTH

Attentional bias toward fear-related stimuli: An investigation with nonselected children and adults children with anxiety disorders

Article

Jan 2005

Research investigating anxiety-related attentional bias for emotional information in anxious and nonanxious children has been equivocal with regard to whether a bias for fear-related stimuli is unique to anxious children or is common to children in general. Moreover, recent cognitive theories have proposed that an attentional bias for objectively threatening stimuli may be common to all individuals, with this effect enhanced in anxious individuals. The current study investigated whether an attentional bias toward fear-related pictures could be found in nonselected children (n=105) and adults (n=47) and whether a sample of clinically anxious children (n=23) displayed an attentional bias for fear-related pictures over and above that expected for nonselected children. Participants completed a dot-probe task that employed fear-related, neutral, and pleasant pictures. As expected, both adults and children showed a stronger attentional bias toward fear-related pictures than toward pleasant pictures. Consistent with some findings in the childhood domain, the extent of the attentional bias toward fear-related pictures did not differ significantly between anxious children and nonselected children. However, compared with nonselected children, anxious children showed a stronger attentional bias overall toward affective picture stimuli.

Snakes, spiders, guns, and syringes: How specific are evolutionary constraints on the detection of threatening stimuli?

Article

Sep 2006

Isabelle Blanchette

In three experiments, the efficiency in detecting fear-relevant and fear-irrelevant visual stimuli are compared. A visual search paradigm is used where participants are presented with matrices of different sizes (4 objects/9 objects) and must determine whether all objects are taken from the same category or whether there is a discrepant one. Results from all experiments were consistent with the threat-superiority effect. Participants were quicker when the target was threatening than when it was not. Other indicators confirmed that the detection of threatening targets involves more efficient processes (reduced slopes, absence of position effects). A crucial aspect of these experiments was the comparison of evolutionary-relevant (snakes, spiders, etc.) and modern (guns, syringes, etc.) threats. The threat-superiority effect was repeatedly found for both types of target. Stronger effects were sometimes observed for modern than for evolutionary-relevant threats. The implications for evolutionary explanations of the effect of fear on visual attention are discussed.

Do Infants Possess an Evolved Spider-Detection Mechanism?

Article

May 2008
COGNITION

Previous studies with various non-human animals have revealed that they possess an evolved predator recognition mechanism that specifies the appearance of recurring threats. We used the preferential looking and habituation paradigms in three experiments to investigate whether 5-month-old human infants have a perceptual template for spiders that generalizes to real-world images of spiders. A fourth experiment assessed whether 5-month-olds have a perceptual template for a non-threatening biological stimulus (i.e., a flower). The results supported the hypothesis that humans, like other species, may possess a cognitive mechanism for detecting specific animals that were potentially harmful throughout evolutionary history.

The face in the crowd revisited: An anger superiority effect with schematic faces

Jan 2001
381-396

A Öhman
D Lundqvist
F Esteves

Öhman, A., Lundqvist, D., & Esteves, F. (2001). The face in the crowd revisited: An anger superiority effect with schematic faces. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 381–396.

Gender and age differences in the prevalence of specific fears and phobias

Jan 1996
33-39

M Fredrikson
P Annas
H Rischer
G Wik

Fredrikson, M., Annas, P., Rischer, H., & Wik, G. (1996). Gender and age differences in the prevalence of specific fears and phobias. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 34, 33–39.

The face in the crowd revisited: An anger superiority effect with schematic faces

Jan 2001
381

Öhman

And along came a spider: An attentional bias for the detection of spiders in young children and adults

Abstract

No full-text available

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