Cognitive Mechanism Of Category-Specific Advantage In Change Detection

Visual attention is the selection of visual information. The mechanisms underlying visual attention have been widely discussed over the past few decades. Previous studies indicated a category-specific fashion of visual attention using flicker paradigm, in which the observers showed attentional advantage to objects from animate domain, such as human face, human body and non-human animals. New, et al. hypothesized that the animate advantage reflects an ancestral priority in visual attention and examined the animate monitoring bias hypothesis in natural scenes. Whereas the face advantage found in Ro, et al. (2001) was interpreted by Palermo and Rhodes as an odd-one-out effect rather than the biological and social importance of face as face was the singleton in the stimuli array.The current study mainly adopted change detection paradigm to investigate the hypothesis that "visual attention is guided by domain knowledge", i.e., the cognitive mechanism of the category-specific effect in visual attention is actually domain specificity and animate objects capture attention more easily compared with inanimate objects. Participants were instructed to detect whether there is a change in the image array and make "yes" or "no" responses accordingly. The stimuli in experiment 1 are derived from six categories, and one of them is from animate domain, the other five inanimate. The results suggested that the change detection of animate objects is more rapid and accurate than that of inanimate objects. To avoid the singleton alternative of animate advantage, we balanced the categories in both domains (3 animate categories and 3 inanimate ones). Again, the results showed change detection advantage of animate objects over the inanimate ones with the absence of singleton. These findings suggested that category-specific visual attention is modulated by domain specificity, rather than the odd-one-out effect. Thus, we concluded that domain knowledge can guide visual attention in a way that animate objects have a stronger capacity in capturing attention, compared with the inanimate ones, which is the cognitive mechanism of the category-specific visual attention in change detection.