Behavior/Humans

Modern Humans Preserve Stone Age Instincts

We are more afraid of animals than of cars

By Stefan Anitei, Science Editor

5th of October 2007, 06:59 GMT

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We live in an urban jungle, but lurking dangers differ from those found in nature. Like Stone Age hunter-gatherers, modern people are still more capable of spotting predators and prey, instead of what can really kill us in a city.

A new research shows that humans are still much more skilled to observe other people and animals than non-living things, with all the dangers they pose to us in the modern, urbanized environment. This enhances the idea that

natural selection shaped in us instincts meant to make us focus on humans and other animals and we still inherit them.

"We're assuming that natural selection takes a long time to build anything anew and that's why this is left over from our past," said co-author Leda Cosmides, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).
In a rich, biotic environment, our ancestors had to monitor both human and non-human predators and prey in order to survive, but our instinct-driven attention has not changed with our current environment.

"Having this pop-out attentional bias for animals is sort of a vestigial behavior," said co-author Joshua New of Yale University's Perception and Cognition Lab.

In the research, subjects had to watch images on computer monitors. The flashing images changed between pairs of different outdoor pictures, the second image being a variant of the first, with one change. The volunteers had to point each time whether they spotted a difference.

The images included animate types, like people and other animals and immobile items, like plants, artifacts that can change position (stapler or wheelbarrow) and still artifacts, like landmarks (windmill or house).

Changes in animals were more rapidly detected than those in inanimate objects. Differences in "living" things were detected in 90 % of the cases compared to 66 % for inanimate objects. Changes in elephants and humans were detected 100 % of the cases, but only 75 % for those in a silo and 67 % for a coffee mug.

It is more likely to die hit by a car than a charging bull, but the subjects detected with greater difficulty changes to vehicles than to animals. Like our appendix, this was once good, but now useless. This explains many human phobias.

"People develop phobias for spiders and snakes and things that were ancestral threats. It's very infrequent to have somebody afraid of cars or electrical outlets," New told LiveScience.

"Those statistically pose much more of a threat to us than a tiger. That makes it an interesting test case as to why do tigers still capture attention."

TAGS:

instinct | brain | sight | vision

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