The detection of human and non-human animals and their unique (and potentially dangerous)
“animation” would have been important to our ancestors’ survival. It would seem plausible
that our ancestors would have required a vigilance above and beyond that dedicated to
other, inanimate, objects. Considering the millions of years of expending extra energy to
monitor these objects, it would also seem likely, at least as advocated by New, Cosmides,
and Tooby (2007), that the human visual system would have developed mechanisms to
allocate attention automatically and quickly to these objects. We tested the New et al.
(2007) “animate monitoring” hypothesis by presenting viewers with a group of animate
objects and a group of inanimate objects using the flicker task—a task that is assumed to
be one that measures automatic visual attention. These objects were presented on a variety
of backgrounds of natural scenes, including some backgrounds that were contextually
inconsistent with the target objects. These objects were also presented in either a consistent
location within each scene or a location that violated that consistency. Only people objects
were consistently more readily detected, not animated objects in general. Detection in this
task was affected by more than just the information provided by the target object. Both
results provide a serious challenge to the “animate monitoring” hypothesis. Furthermore, the
results were shown not to be due to peculiarities of our stimulus set, or by how interesting
the members of each object category were.
iv / xii, 108 leaves ; 29 cm
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:ALU.w.uleth.ca/dspace#10133/3054 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | LaPointe, Mitchell, University of Lethbridge. Faculty of Arts and Science |
| Contributors | Vokey, John |
| Publisher | Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Dept. of Psychology, c2010, Arts and Science, Department of Psychology |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Relation | Thesis (University of Lethbridge. Faculty of Arts and Science) |
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