Study Of Attention Bias On Animate Stimuli

Animacy is the characteristics to distinguish between animate and inanimate stimuli.Animacy is an important domain of human brain cognitive activity,it has great influence on social cognition,language processing,attention and memory.Mostly animate stimuli are about human and animals.Previous studies have found that individuals have an attention bias towards animals of which animals can capture more attention and are preferentially processed by subjects.However,animals can also be divided into two types:threatening and non-threatening animals.Many previous studies have shown that participants hold such attentional bias towards threatening animals,such as snakes and spiders.But whether there is an attention bias to the non-threatening animals or not have not been fully discussed yet.Therefore,this study meant to use eye-tracking techniques to explore the attention bias of non-threatening animate stimuli via three experiments.The animate stimuli discussed in this study were non-threatening animals.The inanimate stimuli discussed in the experiments are also non-threatening.In this study,three experiments were conducted to investigate the attentional bias towards animate stimuli,the automatic processing of animate stimuli,and the potential causes of the attention bias.Experiment 1 used visual search task in which different perception features(high or low)are manipulated to understand if participants will pay more attention to the animate stimuli under different perceptual characteristics.On the basis of experiment 1,experiment 2 used cognitive load paradigm to explored whether individual's attention system could carry out bottom-up processing of animate stimuli,that is,to further explore whether the attention bias towards animate stimuli is regulated by cognitive resources and the cognitive load.Experiment 3 was based on the first two experiments,using the dot-probe task to understand if the causes of such attentional bias is due to facilitation bias or disengagement bias.With the three experimental studies,the following conclusions were drawn:First,compared to inanimate stimuli,subjects have a attention bias to animate stimuli,that is,animate stimuli captured more visual attention.Second,compared with the inanimate stimuli,under the condition of large cognitive load or little cognitive load,the subjects had attention bias to the animate stimuli,and the animate stimuli have a processing priority in different cognitive load conditions.Thirdly,the underlying mechanism of participants' attentional bias towards animate stimulus was the combination of facilitation bias and disengagement bias.Animate stimuli could capture and maintain the attention of the subjects more quickly,once the subjects were captured by animate stimulus,it is difficult to lift from the animate stimulus,resulting in attention bias to the animate stimulus.