Visual attention is not attuned to non-human animal targets’ pathogenicity: an evolutionary mismatch perspective

Abstract

A considerable amount of research has revealed that there exists an evolutionary mismatch between ancestral environments and conditions following the rise of agriculture regarding the contact between humans and animal reservoirs of infectious diseases. Based on this evolutionary mismatch framework, we examined whether visual attention exhibits adaptive attunement toward animal targets’ pathogenicity. Consistent with our predictions, faces bearing heuristic infection cues held attention to a greater extent than did animal vectors of zoonotic infectious diseases. Moreover, the results indicated that attention showed a specialized vigilance toward processing facial cues connoting the presence of infectious diseases, whereas it was allocated comparably between animal disease vectors and disease-irrelevant animals. On the other hand, the pathogen salience manipulation employed to amplify the participants’ contextual-level anti-pathogen motives did not moderate the selective allocation of attentional resources. The fact that visual attention seems poorly equipped to detect and encode animals’ zoonotic transmission risk supports the idea that our evolved disease avoidance mechanisms might have limited effectiveness in combating global outbreaks originating from zoonotic emerging infectious diseases.

Keywords:

• Behavioral immune system
• evolutionary mismatch
• pathogens
• visual attention
• zoonotic diseases

Acknowledgements

We thank Alper Erdem and Ece Kemallarlı for their assistance with data collection and coding. We also thank Bugay Yıldırım, Ceren Metin, and Serkan Özçakan for their insightful comments on the manuscript.

Ethical approval

This study was performed in accordance with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval was granted by the Social and Human Sciences Research and Publication Ethics Committee of Ege University (30-03-2021/41).

Disclosure statement

The authors have no conflicting interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

Data availability statement

The data support the findings of this study are openly available and can be found at the OSF project site: https://osf.io/6g4rf/.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grants from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.