The Visual Search Advantage Of Threatening Body Postures

The rapid detection and identification of threatening stimuli in the environment play a vital role during the evolution; it allows organisms to have priority to process and deal with the threatening stimuli associated with survival, so as to improve the chances of survival. For example, human’s visual system has a faster detection and more effective processing for the potential threatening information, show a faster detection to the threatening targets than the non-threatening targets significantly in visual search paradigm. Despite lots of studies discovered the visual search advantages in threatening emotional faces, and have been confirmed in the neural mechanism, there are still some disputes and shortcomings in this field, such as the disputes for two threat detection advantage theories, do not pay enough attention to the other emotion vectors and the ecological validity of experimental material is not high. For these limitations, this study will use the real emotional body posture as experiment material to investigate the dominant factors of visual search advantages and the role of arm features. This not only supplies the researchs of the faces, but also deepens the dominant factor to threat detection advantages, improve the perceptual factors hypothesis, further rich the theory of threat detection advantage.Experiment 1 investigated the effect of visual search advantage using real body postures. Through asymmetric visual search task, subjects were asked to detect whether there is a target or not in the array. Results found that compared sad target, individual have faster detection speed to the target of anger and fear; when target-absent, the speed to the threatening body postures is slower than non-threatening postures, it indicate that emotional body postures have threat detection advantage. Through invert the emotional body postures(destroy and weaken its emotional content), Experiment 2 investigated the role of the emotion and perception factors in visual search performance, which found that individual search anger and fear body postures is significantly faster than sad body postures either upright or inverted. Threat detection advantage still exists in inverted conditions and perceptual factors may play a leading role in the visual search. Experiment 3 investigates the role of arm features in visual search of threatening body posture, by comparing the arm region of the body posture and the whole body posture. The study found that in the condition of the arm region, the search for anger and fear arms is also faster than the sad arms, the arms of threatening body postures are sufficient to produce a visual search advantage.This study conclude that emotional body postures have threat detection advantages; Perceptual factors play a leading role in the visual search advantage of threatening body posture; The arm features of threatening postures have a higher visual conspicuity, which guide the visual search in perception factor.