Animacy increases second target reporting in a rapid serial visual presentation task

Abstract

Attentional blink occurs when two target items, T1 and T2, are presented within brief moments of each other in a series of rapidly presented items and participants fail to report T2. The purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of characteristics of T2 on T2 reporting. Participants (N = 67) completed 4 blocks of 40 trials. Each trial consisted of 15 images, two of which were designated as T1 and T2. T2 was manipulated in three ways: animacy (animate or inanimate), threat (threatening or nonthreatening), and lag (200 ms or 400 ms after T1). The results indicated that more T2s were reported at the longer lag and that animate objects were reported more often than inanimate objects at both lags. Threat did not have a significant effect on T2 reporting although it interacted with lag: threatening objects were reported more frequently than nonthreatening objects at lag 2 but this trend reversed at lag 4. The results were consistent with the animate monitoring hypothesis, which claims that animate objects, because of their importance in ancestral environments, attract attention more easily than inanimate objects. Animate objects appear to capture attention more easily than inanimate objects as second targets in a rapid serial visual presentation task. This result is similar to animacy advantages reported with other attention tasks and with memory tasks.

Conscious perception of natural images is constrained by category-related visual features

“…Here, we investigated the effect of category membership and image features on conscious access using natural images in the Attentional Blink paradigm (Fig 1A and B; Raymond et al, 1992). By testing images spanning several categories we first show a clear division in performance between animate and inanimate objects, where animate objects reveal a reduced AB caused by the processing of the T1 (Fig 2B), in line with previous reports (Evans & Treisman, 2005;Guerrero & Calvillo, 2016). We further show that this bias is not only expressed between this super-ordinate division, but also extends to various sub-categories.…”

“…We first pooled the images according to animate and inanimate objects (see Table 2). Animate and inanimate objects have previously been shown to be differentially affected during the AB (Evans & Treisman, 2005;Guerrero & Calvillo, 2016;Hagen & Laeng, 2017). Similarly here, a repeated measures 2x2 ANOVA with lag and animacy as factors showed a main effect of lag (F(1,18) = 34.09, p < 0.001, η² = 0.654) and animacy (F(1,18) = 27.72, p < 0.001, η² = 0.…”

“…Likewise, animate and inanimate objects are distinctly represented throughout the ventral visual stream (Sha et al, 2015;Wen et al, 2017), which has been argued to be an evolutionary phenomenon and not contingent on visual experience (Mahon et al, 2009). In our current study, we find that the AB magnitude (ABM -performance difference between Lag-8 and Lag-2) is larger for inanimate objects, similar to Guerrero and Calvillo (2016). The finding by Guerrero and Calvillo has been contested by Hagen and Laeng (2017) who showed that animate objects are simply reported more often, but that the ABM is unaffected.…”

“…Previous studies have shown differences between categories in the AB, most extensively between animate and inanimate objects (Einhäuser, Koch, & Makeig, 2007;Evans & Treisman, 2005;Guerrero & Calvillo, 2016;Hagen & Laeng, 2017). The animacy bias in visual processing has been attributed to evolutionary relevance, as opposed to visual expertise, reflected in its importance for ancestral hunter-gatherer societies (The animate monitoring hypothesis; New, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2007).…”

“…Sha et al, 2015). Behavioural studies have shown that animate objects are more often consciously perceived in rapid serial visual presentations (RSVP) (Evans & Treisman, 2005;Guerrero & Calvillo, 2016;Hagen & Laeng, 2017), more quickly found in visual search (Jackson & Calvillo, 2013), elicit faster responses in discrimination tasks (Carlson, Ritchie, Kriegeskorte, Durvasula, & Ma, 2014;Ritchie, Tovar, & Carlson, 2015), and animate words are better retained in working memory (Nairne, VanArsdall, Pandeirada, Cogdill, & LeBreton, 2013). Aggregated, these findings point to a preferential visual processing of animate objects, most likely also reflected in the representational organisation of the visual stream (Carlson et al, 2014;Ritchie et al, 2015).…”