title: Of snakes and flowers: does preferential detection of pictures of fear-relevant animals in visual search reflect on fear-relevance?
abstract: Previous research in visual search indicates that animal fear-relevant deviants, snakes/spiders, are found faster among non fear-relevant backgrounds, flowers/mushrooms, than vice versa. Moreover, deviant absence was indicated faster among snakes/spiders and detection time for flower/mushroom deviants, but not for snake/spider deviants, increased in larger arrays. The current research indicates that the latter 2 results do not reflect on fear-relevance, but are found only with flower/mushroom controls. These findings may reflect on factors such as background homogeneity, deviant homogeneity, or background-deviant similarity. The current research removes contradictions between previous studies that used animal and social fear-relevant stimuli and indicates that apparent search advantages for fear-relevant deviants seem likely to reflect on delayed attentional disengagement from fear-relevance on control trials.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, QLD, Australia. o.lipp@psy.uq.edu.au
authors.forename: Ottmar V
authors.initials: OV
authors.lastname: Lipp
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000818:Animals; D000835:Animals, Wild; D001007:Anxiety / Q000523:psychology; D001290:Attitude; D002755:Choice Behavior; D005239:Fear; D005260:Female; D035264:Flowers; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011235:Predatory Behavior; D011930:Reaction Time; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological; D012911:Snakes; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014796:Visual Perception