What's so special about slithering serpents? children and adults rapidly detect snakes based on their simple features

Visual Cognition

Volumn 19, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 129-143

  Lobue, Vanessa ^a   Deloache, Judy S ^b  

^a RUTGERS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA   (United States)

Author keywords

Attention; Detection; Threat

Indexed keywords

ADULT; ARTICLE; ATTENTION; CHILD; COLOR; FEMALE; HUMAN; HUMAN EXPERIMENT; INFORMATION PROCESSING; MALE; NORMAL HUMAN; PHOTOGRAPHY; PHYSICAL PARAMETERS; PRESCHOOL CHILD; PRIORITY JOURNAL; SNAKE; STIMULATION; VISION;

EID: 78650362375     PISSN: 13506285     EISSN: 14640716     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13506285.2010.522216     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. Batty, M. J., Cave, K. R., & Pauli, P. (2005). Abstract stimuli associated with threat through conditioning cannot be detected preattentively. Emotion, 5, 418-430.
2. Blanchette, I. (2006). Snakes, spiders, guns, and syringes: How specific are evolutionary constraints on the detection of threatening stimuli? Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 59, 1484-1504.
3. Brattstrom, B. H. (1955). The coral snake "mimic" problem and protective coloration. Evolution, 9, 217-219.
4. Brosch, T., & Sharma, D. (2005). The role of fear-relevant stimuli in visual search: A comparison of phylogenetic and ontogenetic stimuli. Emotion, 5, 360-364.
5. Cave, K. R., & Batty, M. J. (2006). From searching for features to searching for threat: Drawing the boundary between preattentive and attentive vision. Visual Cognition, 14, 629-646.
6. Flykt, A. (2005). Visual search with biological threat stimuli: Accuracy, reactions times, and heart rate changes. Emotion, 5, 349-353.
7. Isbell, L. (2006). Snakes as agents of evolutionary change in primate brains. Journal of Human Evolution, 51, 1-35.
8. Lipp, O., Derakshan, N., Waters, A. M., & Logies, S. (2004). Snakes and cats in the flower bed: Fast detection is not specific to pictures of fear-relevant animals. Emotion, 4, 233-250.
9. LoBue, V. (2009). More than just a face in the crowd: Detection of emotional facial expressions in young children and adults. Developmental Science, 12, 305-313.
10. LoBue, V. (2010). And along came a spider: Superior detection of spiders in children and adults. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 107, 59-66.
11. LoBue, V., & DeLoache, J. S. (2008). Detecting the snake in the grass: Attention to fear-relevant stimuli by adults and young children. Psychological Science, 19, 284-289.
12. LoBue, V., & DeLoache, J. S. (2010). Superior detection of threat-relevant stimuli in infancy. Developmental Science, 13, 221-228.
13. Ohman, A. (1993). Fear and anxiety as emotional phenomena: Clinical phenomenology, evolutionary perspectives, and information-processing mechanisms. In M. Lewis & J. Haviland (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (pp. 511-536). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
14. Ohman, A., Flykt, A., & Esteves, F. (2001). Emotion drives attention: Detecting the snake in the grass. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130, 466-478.
15. Ohman, A., & Mineka, S. (2001). Fears, phobias, and preparedness: Toward an evolved module of fear and fear learning. Psychological Review, 108, 483-522.
16. Ohman, A., & Mineka, S. (2003). The malicious serpent: Snakes as a prototypical stimulus for an evolved module of fear. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12, 5-8.
17. Treisman, A., & Gormican, S. (1988). Feature analysis in early vision: Evidence from search asymmetries. Psychological Review, 95, 15-48.
18. Waters, A. M., Lipp, O. V., & Spence, S. H. (2004). Attentional bias toward fear-related stimuli: An investigation with nonselected children and adults and children with anxiety disorders. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 89, 320-337.