The Effects of Human Age, Group Composition, and Behavior on the Likelihood of Being Injured by Attacking Pumas

Coss, Richard G.; Fitzhugh, E. Lee; Schmid-Holmes, Sabine; Kenyon, Marc W.; Etling, Kathy

doi:10.2752/175303708x390491

Cited by 11 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…These encounters can be dramatic. Coss, Fitzhugh, Schmid‐Holmes, Kenyon, and Etling () reported an incident about 10 km from a tribal school we sampled in which approximately 20 5 to 9‐year‐old girls collecting firewood surrounded a leopard that had seized their companion and beat it repeatedly with their sticks until the leopard dropped the girl and fled. In addition to word‐of‐mouth communication as evidenced above, newspaper articles about wildlife attacks are also posted in local eateries.…”

Section: General Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Penkunas

Coss

2013

Developmental Science

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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.

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Section: General Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Penkunas

Coss

2013

Developmental Science

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“…The putative hominin ancestors of modern humans were not exempt from predation as an intense source of natural selection for the past 6 million years (Coss & Moore, 2002;Treves & Palmqvist, 2007). Even in today's rural environments, humans are occasionally killed and eaten by large pythons (Headland & Greene, 2011) and felids such as leopards, lions, pumas, and tigers (Corbett, 1948;Coss, Fitzhugh, Schmid-Holmes, Kenyon, & Etling, 2009;Noronha, 1999;Packer, Ikanda, Kissui, & Kushnir, 2005;Treves & Naughton-Treves, 1999). Isbell (2006) provided substantial historical evidence supporting her argument that predation by snakes on early primates has acted as a strong source of selection shaping the evolution of a visual system attuned to detecting snakes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Rapid detection of visually provocative animals by preschool children and adults

Penkunas

Coss

2013

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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“…hominin ancestors also suffered from predation, and they continue to experience predation from large-bodied felids and snakes in rural areas (Coss, Fitzhugh, Schmid-Holmes, Kenyon, and Etling, 2009;Coss and Moore, 2002;Hart and Sussman, 2005;Headland and Greene, 2011;Treves and Palmqvist, 2007). The ability of primates to rapidly respond to potential danger is critical to their survival (Caro, 2005).…”

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Dangerous Animals Capture and Maintain Attention in Humans

et al. 2014

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Predation is a major source of natural selection on primates and may have shaped attentional processes that allow primates to rapidly detect dangerous animals. Because ancestral humans were subjected to predation, a process that continues at very low frequencies, we examined the visual processes by which men and women detect dangerous animals (snakes and lions). We recorded the eye movements of participants as they detected images of a dangerous animal (target) among arrays of nondangerous animals (distractors) as well as detected images of a nondangerous animal (target) among arrays of dangerous animals (distractors). We found that participants were quicker to locate targets when the targets were dangerous animals compared with nondangerous animals, even when spatial frequency and luminance were controlled. The participants were slower to locate nondangerous targets because they spent more time looking at dangerous distractors, a process known as delayed disengagement, and looked at a larger number of dangerous distractors. These results indicate that dangerous animals capture and maintain attention in humans, suggesting that historical predation has shaped some facets of visual orienting and its underlying neural architecture in modern humans.

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The Effects of Human Age, Group Composition, and Behavior on the Likelihood of Being Injured by Attacking Pumas

Cited by 11 publications

References 20 publications

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

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

Rapid detection of visually provocative animals by preschool children and adults

Dangerous Animals Capture and Maintain Attention in Humans

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