Abstract
The “animate monitoring hypothesis” (New, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2007) states that humans have evolved to preferentially allocate attention towards animals in natural scenes, since this ability would be beneficial to survival. It remains unclear which visual information would be exploited by the human brain in accomplishing a fast and automatic recognition of animals within a cluttered visual scene and it has been hypothesized that low spatial frequencies contained in an image could be important in the visual detection or monitoring of animals. The present study aimed to address this question by a series of experiments. First, an experiment displaying six objects (i.e. animals and man-made objects) in a circular pattern was conducted to investigate whether attention is preferentially and spontaneously directed towards animals. This experiment failed to reveal any such preference. A second experiment was conducted with the aim to replicate previous findings by New et al. (2007) in a change detection paradigm. However, artificially-constructed scenes were used, which resulted in a more controlled experimental situation than that of the original experiment. This experiment replicated significant differences between animals and artifacts in response times in different scene contexts. Eye-tracking measures indicated that the advantage for animals was probably not due to monitoring in the periphery of the visual field. A third experiment investigated the importance of spatial frequencies and color in relation to preferential detections of animals. This revealed that color was particularly important when images were filtered towards lower spatial frequencies, but not when they were presented in broadband.