No evidence of attentional prioritization for threatening targets in visual search

Zsidó, András N. and Hout, Michael C. and Hernandez, Marko and White, Bryan and Polák, Jakub and Kiss, Botond L. and Godwin, Hayward J. (2024) No evidence of attentional prioritization for threatening targets in visual search. SCIENTIFIC REPORTS, 14 (1). No. 5651. ISSN 2045-2322

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Abstract

Throughout human evolutionary history, snakes have been associated with danger and threat. Research has shown that snakes are prioritized by our attentional system, despite many of us rarely encountering them in our daily lives. We conducted two high-powered, pre-registered experiments (total N= 224) manipulating target prevalence to understand this heightened prioritization of threatening targets. Target prevalence refers to the proportion of trials wherein a target is presented; reductions in prevalence consistently reduce the likelihood that targets will be found. We reasoned that snake targets in visual search should experience weaker efects of low target prevalence compared to non-threatening targets (rabbits) because they should be prioritized by searchers despite appearing rarely. In both experiments, we found evidence of classic prevalence efects but (contrasting prior work) we also found that search for threatening targets was slower and less accurate than for nonthreatening targets. This surprising result is possibly due to methodological issues common in prior studies, including comparatively smaller sample sizes, fewer trials, and a tendency to exclusively examine conditions of relatively high prevalence. Our fndings call into question accounts of threat prioritization and suggest that prior attention fndings may be constrained to a narrow range of circumstances.

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