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Animates receive preferential attentional processing over inanimates because, from an evolutionary perspective, animates are important to human survival. We investigated whether animacy affects visual statistical learning-the detection and extraction of regularities in visual information from our rich, dynamic, and complex environment. Participants completed a selective-attention task, in which regularities were embedded in two visual streams, an attended and an unattended visual stream. The attended visual stream always consisted of line-drawings of non-objects, while the unattended visual stream consisted of line-drawings of either animates or inanimates. Participants then completed a triplet-discrimination task, which assessed their ability to extract regularities from the attended and unattended visual streams. We also assessed participants' awareness of regularities in the visual statistical learning task, and asked if any learning strategies were used. We were specifically interested in whether the animacy status of line-drawings in the unattended visual stream would affect visual statistical learning. There were four key findings. First, selective attention modulates visual statistical learning, with greater visual statistical learning for attended than for unattended information. Second, animacy does not affect visual statistical learning, with no differences found in visual statistical learning performance between the animate and inanimate condition. Third, awareness of regularities was associated with visual statistical learning of attended information. Fourth, participants used strategies (e.g., naming or labelling stimuli) during the visual statistical learning task. Further research is required to understand whether visual statistical learning is one of the adaptive functions that evolved from ancestral environments.

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The animate monitoring hypothesis (AMH) purports that humans evolved specialized mechanisms that prioritize attention to animates over inanimates. Importantly, the hypothesis emphasizes that any animate-an entity that can move on its own-should take priority in attention. While many experiments have found general support for this hypothesis, there have yet been no systematic investigations into whether the type of animate matters for animate monitoring. In the present research we addressed this issue across three experiments. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 53) searched for an animate or inanimate entity in a search task, and the animate was either a mammal or a non-mammal (e.g., bird, reptile, insect). Mammals were found significantly faster than inanimates, replicating the basic AMH finding. However, they were also found significantly faster than non-mammals, who were not found faster than inanimates. Two additional experiments were conducted to probe for differences among types of non-mammals using an inattentional blindness task. Experiment 2 (N = 171) compared detection of mammals, insects, and inanimates, and Experiment 3 (N = 174) compared birds and herpetofauna (reptiles and amphibians). In Experiment 2, mammals were spontaneously detected at significantly higher rates than insects, who were detected at only slightly higher rates than the inanimates. Furthermore, when participants did not consciously identify the target, they nonetheless could correctly guess the higher level category of the target (living vs. nonliving thing) for the mammals and the inanimates, but could not do so for the insects. We also found in Experiment 3 that reptiles and birds were spontaneously detected at rates similar to the mammals, but like insects they were not identified as living things at rates greater than chance when they were not consciously detected. These results do not support a strong claim that all animates are prioritized in attention, but they do call for a more nuanced view. As such, they open a new window into the nature of animate monitoring, which have implications for theories of its origin.

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The picture-word interference (PWI) paradigm allows us to delve into the process of lexical access in language production with great precision. It creates situations of interference between target pictures and superimposed distractor words that participants must consciously ignore to name the pictures. Yet, although the PWI paradigm has offered numerous insights at all levels of lexical representation, in this work we expose an extended lack of control regarding the variable animacy. Animacy has been shown to have a great impact on cognition, especially when it comes to the mechanisms of attention, which are highly biased toward animate entities to the detriment of inanimate objects. Furthermore, animate nouns have been shown to be semantically richer and prioritized during lexical access, with effects observable in multiple psycholinguistic tasks. Indeed, not only does the performance on a PWI task directly depend on the different stages of lexical access to nouns, but also attention has a fundamental role in it, as participants must focus on targets and ignore interfering distractors. We conducted a systematic review with the terms "picture-word interference paradigm" and "animacy" in the databases PsycInfo and Psychology Database. The search revealed that only 12 from a total of 193 PWI studies controlled for animacy, and only one considered it as a factor in the design. The remaining studies included animate and inanimate stimuli in their materials randomly, sometimes in a very disproportionate amount across conditions. We speculate about the possible impact of this uncontrolled variable mixing on many types of effects within the framework of multiple theories, namely the Animate Monitoring Hypothesis, the WEAVER++ model, and the Independent Network Model in an attempt to fuel the theoretical debate on this issue as well as the empirical research to turn speculations into knowledge.

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Animacy plays an essential role in survival and adaptive behaviour. Previous studies have found that dangerous or threatening animals can capture and hold attention. However, it is unclear whether and how neutral animate objects guide attentional allocation. It is also uncertain whether the modulation of animate objects on attentional allocation is based on the object itself (object-based attention) or its location (space-based attention). Therefore, the present study adopted the well-established two-rectangle paradigm and used animate and inanimate objects as stimuli to test the abovementioned problems. The results revealed that object-based effects were obtained for both animate and inanimate objects. However, the object-based effects were larger when the cue appeared on the animate objects than on the inanimate objects, due to faster response to invalid same-object trials and slower response to invalid different-object trials. Beyond that, we also further confirmed that animacy itself, not the low-level visual complexity, led to the differential object-based effects. These results suggest that neutral animals also mattered to our attentional allocation and animacy can modulate object-based attentional selection by capturing and holding visual attention on the animate objects. Ultimately, the present study not only enriches our understanding of how neutral animate objects guide attentional allocation and support the attentional prioritisation theory, but also further extends and amends the animate-monitoring hypothesis.

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Our visual system is built to extract regularities in how objects in our visual environment appear in relation to each other across time and space ("visual statistical learning"). Existing research indicates that visual statistical learning is modulated by selective attention. Our attentional system prioritises information that enables adaptive behaviour; for example, animates are prioritised over inanimates (the "animacy advantage"). The present study examined the effects of selective attention and animacy on visual statistical learning in young adults (N = 284). We tested visual statistical learning of attended and unattended information across four animacy conditions: (1) living things that can self-initiate movement (animals); (2) living things that cannot self-initiate movement (fruits and vegetables); (3) non-living things that can generate movement (vehicles); and (4) non-living things that cannot generate movement (tools and kitchen utensils). We implemented a 4-point confidence rating scale as an assessment of participants' awareness of the regularities in the visual statistical learning task. There were four key findings. First, selective attention plays a critical role by modulating visual statistical learning. Second, animacy does not play a special role in visual statistical learning. Third, visual statistical learning of attended information cannot be exclusively accounted for by unconscious knowledge. Fourth, performance on the visual statistical learning task is associated with the proportion of stimuli that were named or labelled. Our findings support the notion that visual statistical learning is a powerful mechanism by which our visual system resolves an abundance of sensory input over time.

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Grammatical gender processing during language production has classically been studied using the so-called picture-word interference (PWI) task. In this procedure, participants are presented with pictures they must name using target nouns while ignoring superimposed written distractor nouns. Variations in response times are expected depending on the congruency between the gender values of targets and distractors. However, there have been disparate results in terms of the mandatory character of an agreement context to observe competitive gender effects and the interpretation of the direction of these effects in Romance languages, this probably due to uncontrolled variables such as animacy. In the present study, we conducted two PWI experiments with European Portuguese speakers who were asked to produce bare nouns. The percentage of animate targets within the list was manipulated: 0, 25, 50, and 100%. A gender congruency effect was found restricted to the 0% list (all targets were inanimate). Results support the selection of gender in transparent languages in the absence of an agreement context, as predicted by the Gender Acquisition and Processing (GAP) hypothesis (Sá-Leite et al., 2019), and are interpreted through the attentional mechanisms involved in the PWI paradigm, in which the processing of animate targets would be favored to the detriment of distractors due to biological relevance and semantic prioritization.

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The animate monitoring hypothesis proposes that humans are predisposed to attend preferentially to animate entities in the environment (New, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2007). However, there have to date been no developmental investigations of animate monitoring in younger populations, despite the relevance of such evidence to this hypothesis. Here we demonstrate that adults and preschoolers recall a novel sequence of action with greater fidelity if it involves an animate over an inanimate. Experiments 1 (adults) and 2 (preschoolers) provide initial support for this phenomena, when a familiar animate (a dog) is used in the sequence instead of a block. Experiment 2 also revealed that a beetle is not clearly superior to a block, hinting at a possible hierarchy of animacy. Experiment 3 provided the clearest evidence for this memory advantage in preschoolers, when a novel animate that was perceptually identical to two other inanimate controls enhanced memory for the sequence. These results indicate that animate monitoring does not require extensive experience to develop, and could possibly be the result of innate dispositions.

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Some evolutionary psychologists have hypothesized that animals have priority in human attention. That is, they should be detected and selected more efficiently than other types of objects, especially man-made ones. Such a priority mechanism should automatically deploy more attentional resources and dynamic monitoring toward animal stimuli than nonanimals. Consequently, we postulated that variations of the multiple object or identity tracking and multiple event monitoring tasks should be particularly suitable paradigms for addressing the animate monitoring hypothesis, given their dynamic properties and dependency on divided attention. We used images of animals and artifacts and found neither a substantial sign of improvement in tracking the positions associated with animal stimuli nor a significant distracting effect of animals. We also failed to observe a significant prioritization in orders of response for positions associated with animals. While we observed an advantage for animals in event monitoring, this appeared to be dependent on properties of the task, as confirmed in further experiments. Moreover, we observed a small but inconclusive advantage for animals in identity accuracy. Thus, under certain conditions, some bias toward animals could be observed, but the evidence was weak and inconclusive. To conclude, effect sizes were generally small and not conclusively in favor of the expected attentional bias for animals. We found moderate to strong evidence that images of animals do not improve positional tracking, do not act as more effective distractors, are not selected prior to artifacts in the response phase, and are not easier to monitor for changes in size.

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Attentional blink occurs when two target items, T1 and T2, are presented within brief moments of each other in a series of rapidly presented items and participants fail to report T2. The purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of characteristics of T2 on T2 reporting. Participants (N = 67) completed 4 blocks of 40 trials. Each trial consisted of 15 images, two of which were designated as T1 and T2. T2 was manipulated in three ways: animacy (animate or inanimate), threat (threatening or nonthreatening), and lag (200 ms or 400 ms after T1). The results indicated that more T2s were reported at the longer lag and that animate objects were reported more often than inanimate objects at both lags. Threat did not have a significant effect on T2 reporting although it interacted with lag: threatening objects were reported more frequently than nonthreatening objects at lag 2 but this trend reversed at lag 4. The results were consistent with the animate monitoring hypothesis, which claims that animate objects, because of their importance in ancestral environments, attract attention more easily than inanimate objects. Animate objects appear to capture attention more easily than inanimate objects as second targets in a rapid serial visual presentation task. This result is similar to animacy advantages reported with other attention tasks and with memory tasks.

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Inattentional blindness occurs when individuals are engaged in an attention-demanding task and fail to detect unexpected objects in their visual field. Two experiments examined whether certain unexpected objects are more easily detected than others. The unexpected objects were animate and threatening (e.g., snake), animate and nonthreatening (e.g., bird), inanimate and threatening (e.g., gun), or inanimate and nonthreatening (e.g., bed). Three hypotheses were tested: the snake detection hypothesis (snakes will be detected more frequently than all other objects), the animate monitoring hypothesis (animate objects will be detected more frequently than inanimate objects), and the threat superiority hypothesis (threatening objects will be detected more frequently than nonthreatening objects). Only the animate monitoring hypothesis was supported in both experiments. These results suggest that animate objects capture attention in the absence of task-relevant goals and that snakes do not show an advantage over other animate objects in inattentional blindness tasks.

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