Scientific article
OA Policy
English

That baby caught my eye… Attention modulation by biologically relevant stimuli

Published inEmotion, vol. 7, no. 3, p. 685-689
Publication date2007
Abstract

An alternative to the view that during evolution the human brain became specialized to preferentially attend to threat-related stimuli is to assume that all classes of stimuli that have high biological significance are prioritized by the attention system. Newborns are highly biologically relevant stimuli for members of a species, as their survival is important for reproductive success. The authors examined whether the Kindchenschema (baby schema) as described by Lorenz (1943) captures attention in the dot probe task. The results confirm attentional capture by photos of human infants presented to the left visual field, suggesting right hemisphere advantage. The magnitude of the attentional modulation was highly correlated with subjective arousal ratings of the photos. The findings show that biologically significant positive stimuli are prioritized by the attention system.

Keywords
  • Attention
  • Emotion
  • Relevance
Research groups
Citation (ISO format)
BROSCH, Tobias, SANDER, David, SCHERER, Klaus R. That baby caught my eye… Attention modulation by biologically relevant stimuli. In: Emotion, 2007, vol. 7, n° 3, p. 685–689. doi: 10.1037/1528-3542.7.3.685
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Article (Published version)
accessLevelPublic
Identifiers
Journal ISSN1528-3542
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