Awarded Best Poster Presentation at Georgia College Psychology Conference (2018)
Summary
The goal of this project was to determine whether animacy (how “alive” an object is) or relevance (degree of which an object belongs somewhere), provides a greater advantage in our ability to quickly detect changes in our environment.
We used a 2×2 change detection paradigm, measuring reaction time to determine if animacy or relevance to a given scene had a greater impact on performance. This paradigm presented participants with different scenes, looping one “before” and one “after” image with one object changing its position until a response (in ms) is given. A black screen (mask) was provided between images to “reset” participants visual perception.
Upon completion of data analysis, we found statistically significant evidence, providing that changes with animate objects (dog, cat, pig, etc.) elicited much quicker reaction times compared to inanimate objects (keys, hammer, lamp, etc.). In addition, we found that participants had faster reactions to changes in irrelevant target objects to the given scene (such as an axe in the living room) compared to relevant objects in a given scene (keys on a coffee table).
Our hypothesis was supported in suggesting that animacy is given priority in visual attention and provides a stronger perceptual advantage than relevance. This advantage may be attributed as an evolutionary adaptation that could have benefited ancestral priorities.