Human Young Children as well as Adults Demonstrate 'Superior' Rapid Snake Detection When Typical Striking Posture Is Displayed by the Snake
Human Young Children as well as Adults Demonstrate 'Superior' Rapid Snake Detection When Typical Striking Posture Is Displayed by the Snake
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DOI：
10.1371/journal.pone.0015122
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发表时间：
2010-11-30
期刊：
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Kawai, Nobuyuki
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Masataka, Nobuo;Hayakawa, Sachiko;Kawai, Nobuyuki
人类和一些非人类灵长类动物有一种进化的倾向，通过检测蛇的存在比与恐惧无关的刺激更快地将蛇与恐惧联系起来。在本实验中，共有74名3- 4岁的儿童和成人被要求在一组8张花的黑白白色照片中找到一张蛇的黑白白色照片作为干扰物。作为目标刺激，我们准备了两组蛇的照片，其中一组是一条蛇展示了一个典型的攻击姿态，另一组是一条休息的蛇。当发现蛇的照片的反应时，这两种类型的刺激之间进行比较，其平均值被发现显着较小的蛇的照片显示出惊人的姿态比蛇的照片休息在成人和儿童。这些研究结果表明，人类对蛇本身的感知偏差可以根据它们的存在作为恐惧相关刺激的程度的差异来区分。
Humans as well as some nonhuman primates have an evolved predisposition to associate snakes with fear by detecting their presence as fear-relevant stimuli more rapidly than fear-irrelevant ones. In the present experiment, a total of 74 of 3- to 4-year-old children and adults were asked to find a single target black-and-white photo of a snake among an array of eight black-and-white photos of flowers as distracters. As target stimuli, we prepared two groups of snake photos, one in which a typical striking posture was displayed by a snake and the other in which a resting snake was shown. When reaction time to find the snake photo was compared between these two types of the stimuli, its mean value was found to be significantly smaller for the photos of snakes displaying striking posture than for the photos of resting snakes in both the adults and children. These findings suggest the possibility that the human perceptual bias for snakes per se could be differentiated according to the difference of the degree to which their presence acts as a fear-relevant stimulus.