TY  - JOUR
A1  - Yang, Jiongjiong
A1  - Wang, Aobing
A1  - Yan, Ming
A1  - Zhu, Zijian
A1  - Chen, Cheng
A1  - Wang, Yizhou
T1  - Distinct processing for pictures of animals and objects Evidence from eye movements
JF  - Emotion : a new journal from the American Psychological Association
N2  - Many studies have suggested that emotional stimuli orient and engage attention. There is also evidence that animate stimuli, such as those from humans and animals, cause attentional bias. However, categorical and emotional factors are usually mixed, and it is unclear to what extent human context influences attentional allocation. To address this issue, we tracked participants' eye movements while they viewed pictures with animals and inanimate images (i.e., category) as focal objects. These pictures had either negative or neutral emotional valence, and either human body parts or nonhuman parts were near the focal objects (i.e., context). The picture's valence, arousal, position, size, and most of the low-level visual features were matched across categories. The results showed that nonhuman animals were more likely to be attended to and to be attended to for longer times than inanimate objects. The same pattern held for the human contexts (vs. nonhuman contexts). The effects of emotional valence, category, and context interacted. Specifically, in images with a negative valence, focal animals and objects with human context had comparable numbers of gaze fixations and gaze duration. These results highlighted the attentional bias to animate parts of a picture and clarified that the effects of category, valence, and picture context interacted to influence attentional allocation.
KW  - emotion
KW  - category
KW  - attention
KW  - eye-tracking
Y1  - 2012
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026848
SN  - 1528-3542
VL  - 12
IS  - 3
SP  - 540
EP  - 551
PB  - American Psychological Association
CY  - Washington
ER  -