Japanese Monkeys (Macaca fuscata) Quickly Detect Snakes but Not Spiders: Evolutionary Origins of Fear-Relevant Animals
Japanese Monkeys (Macaca fuscata) Quickly Detect Snakes but Not Spiders: Evolutionary Origins of Fear-Relevant Animals
复制标题
DOI：
10.1037/com0000032
复制
发表时间：
2016-08-01
影响因子：
1.4
通讯作者：
Koda, Hiroki
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Kawai, Nobuyuki;Koda, Hiroki
人类通过视觉感知迅速察觉到进化威胁的存在。许多理论家认为，人类倾向于对蛇和蜘蛛做出反应，作为进化上与恐惧相关的刺激。有证据表明，人类成年人、儿童和幼稚的猴子都能更快地从鲜花图片中发现蛇的图片，反之亦然，但最近的神经生理学和行为研究表明，蜘蛛的处理方式实际上可能与非威胁动物相似。灵长类动物快速发现和快速学习恐惧的证据仅限于蛇，而蜘蛛则不存在这样的证据，这表明恐蛇和恐蜘蛛之间存在质的差异。在这里，我们发现，天真的日本猴子在8张无威胁动物图片(考拉)中检测到一张蛇图片的速度比反过来更快；然而，蜘蛛和令人愉快的动物在检测方面没有观察到这样的差异。蛇和蜘蛛之间的这些强烈差异是灵长类视觉系统倾向于关注蛇而不是蜘蛛的最令人信服的证据。这些发现表明，对蛇的注意力偏向是有进化基础的，但对蜘蛛的偏向更多地是由于自上而下的、概念上驱动的情绪对注意力捕捉的影响。
Humans quickly detect the presence of evolutionary threats through visual perception. Many theorists have considered humans to be predisposed to respond to both snakes and spiders as evolutionarily fear-relevant stimuli. Evidence supports that human adults, children, and snake-naive monkeys all detect pictures of snakes among pictures of flowers more quickly than vice versa, but recent neurophysiological and behavioral studies suggest that spiders may, in fact, be processed similarly to nonthreat animals. The evidence of quick detection and rapid fear learning by primates is limited to snakes, and no such evidence exists for spiders, suggesting qualitative differences between fear of snakes and fear of spiders. Here, we show that snake-naive Japanese monkeys detect a single snake picture among 8 nonthreat animal pictures (koala) more quickly than vice versa; however, no such difference in detection was observed between spiders and pleasant animals. These robust differences between snakes and spiders are the most convincing evidence that the primate visual system is predisposed to pay attention to snakes but not spiders. These findings suggest that attentional bias toward snakes has an evolutionary basis but that bias toward spiders is more due to top-down, conceptually driven effects of emotion on attention capture.