Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

In our everyday lives we are presented with more information than we can possibly take in. For this reason, we select from the information that is available to us. This selection process is often volitional (endogenous) but sometimes things in the world draw our attention reflexively (exogenously). When attending to visual information, we tend to look at things that interest us (overt selection) though occasionally we may secretly attend to things out of the corner of our eyes (covert attention). These processes of attending to some information to the exclusion of other information is the focus of my research. Humans seem to have an overwhelming preference to attend to things with minds, that is, subjects in our world that we perceive as having experience (they can feel things) and agency (they can do things). Researchers have struggled and debated on how to isolate the effects of mind on human attention from other features in the world that do not represent mind (e.g., the brightness of an object). My lab has recently discovered that people ascribe less 'mind' to people seen in image form versus in the flesh, and even less mind again to images of images of people. This new phenomenon, which we coined the 'Medusa effect', provides a way to tease apart the attention effects of mind from nonmind. In this proposal three levels of investigation are outlined as representative of my lab's program of research. Each level is concerned with the application of the Medusa effect to identify an observer's attentional selection of information that is perceived to represent a mind. At the first level of investigation attentional orienting to static images (e.g., photos) is examined. At the second level, dynamic images (e.g., videos) are utilised. At the third level, the stimuli are real people. Behavioural measures are obtained throughout. The idea emerging from the proposed research is that the principles of attentional selection are shaped by the context in which they operate. The present proposal stands as a particularly strong example of this view by examining the ways that humans' preference toward minded beings is influenced by the complexity of the situation that they are embedded within.