A comparison of rural and urban Indian children's visual detection of threatening and nonthreatening animals

Abstract

Recent studies indicate that young children preferentially attend to snakes, spiders, and lions compared with nondangerous species, but these results have yet to be replicated in populations that actually experience dangerous animals in nature. This multi-site study investigated the visual-detection biases of southern Indian children towards two potentially dangerous taxa, snakes and lions, that constituted major threats during human evolution. Three- to 8-year-old children from two distinct populations were presented with visual-search tasks containing one target image embedded in matrices of eight distractor images. Children living in Bangalore city, an urban setting in which exposure to dangerous animals would only occur occasionally during family outings to zoos and forest areas, were compared with children living in and around National Parks where exposure to dangerous species is frequent. In the first two experiments, children from both locations detected snake and lion images more rapidly than nonthreatening lizard and antelope images, respectively. Neither urban nor rural children displayed a bias for detecting horses versus cows, the latter constituting a familiar animal with strong religious significance. For all three experiments, the reaction times of urban and rural children were very similar, indicating that periodic exposure to dangerous animals early in life, coupled with adult cautioning, did not facilitate better snake and lion detection. This consistency of urban and rural children with different exposure to dangerous animals suggests that detection of some dangerous species may reflect both experience in nature and visual biases shaped by natural selection.

Evolutionary Relevance and Experience Contribute to Face Discrimination in Infant Macaques (Macaca mulatta)

“…The present study supports our view, suggesting some aspects of early face specialization may be influenced by experience-independent adaptive mechanisms, sensitive to faces that were recurrent, and posed widespread opportunities and/or threats, over the course of evolution (e.g., LoBue & DeLoache, 2010). That is, there may be some experience-expectant mechanisms, which, even in the absence of environmental input, still may guide visual processing for stimuli of high evolutionary relevance (LoBue, 2010; Lobue & Deloache, 2011; Penkunas & Coss, 2013). …”

Temperament and Attention as Core Mechanisms in the Early Emergence of Anxiety

“…Importantly, these biases precede the development of fear for these potential threats [Oldfield, 1971] and seem to be independent of exposure to the threat in the child’s environment [Penkunas & Coss, 2013]. While a perceptual sensitivity to threat may be a normative, evolutionary-based safety mechanism, there is growing evidence that a pronounced bias in this attention mechanism may lay the foundation for anxiety.…”

“…However it does not address how these biases develop, the nature of the relation between these biases and anxiety symptoms, or if these biases are a precursor or a symptom of anxiety. To answer these questions, longitudinal studies assessing bias in attention over time and their relation across development to anxiety are required [Penkunas & Coss, 2013]. To our knowledge, these studies have yet to be published.…”

Pulvinar neurons reveal neurobiological evidence of past selection for rapid detection of snakes

“…The position of primates as prey of snakes has, in fact, been argued to have constituted strong selection favoring the evolution of the ability to detect snakes quickly as a means of avoiding them, beginning with the earliest primates (2,5). Across primate species, ages, and (human) cultures, snakes are indeed detected visually more quickly than innocuous stimuli, even in cluttered scenes (6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11). Physiological responses reveal that humans are also able to detect snakes visually even before becoming consciously aware of them (12).…”