Empirical studies on physiological and evolutional origins of innate fear.

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25285199
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B)
• Allocation Type: Partial Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Experimental psychology
• Research Institution: Nagoya University
• Principal Investigator: KAWAI Nobuyuki 名古屋大学, 情報科学研究科, 准教授 (30335062)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): 香田 啓貴 京都大学, 霊長類研究所, 助教 (70418763)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: 恐怖 / 霊長類 / 生得性 / 脳波 / ヘビ・クモ / 進化

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Effective detections for a potential threat are important for survival. Humans seem to have a predisposed visual system to attend threatening objects, especially snakes. Although both snakes and spiders have been regarded as the prototypical evolutionary threat-relevant stimuli, there is only evidence that snakes constituted a serious threat to humans. We compared reaction times to detect deviant pictures of snakes and spiders in the background of non-threatening koala pictures by monkeys and humans, and found that the RTs to detect snakes were faster than to detect koalas, whereas the RTs to detect deviant pictures of spiders did not differ from those to detect koalas. We explored a possibility that spiders may be prototypical evolutionary threat-relevant stimuli in other ways and confirmed that only snakes provided strong evolutionary pressure to develop astute perceptual capacities in ancestral primates. Primates and humans evolved visual systems to detect snakes more efficiently.

Free Research Field

社会科学