FT22.4 - Visual attention to threat in the Himba, a remote people of Namibia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Threatening stimuli capture visual attention more rapidly than benign stimuli. The canonical interpretation of this robust finding is that the brain evolved a “fear module” enabling rapid detection of threats common at the time of mammalian evolution, such as snakes and spiders. This rapid attentional capture is thought to enable prioritized processing of threatening stimuli, providing a survival advantage, and is assumed to be universal. However, these findings have been documented almost entirely in WEIRD (white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) populations. Here, we address this gap by examining threat detection in a remote African culture, the Himba. Using a touch screen visual search task, we found that both evolutionary-relevant (snakes and spiders) and modern threats (knives and syringes) captured attention more rapidly than benign stimuli. To our knowledge, this is the first study showing that the same kind of threats that rapidly capture visual attention in the West also rapidly capture visual attention in the Himba. List of authors and affiliations: Anna Blumenthal: University Laval; Serge Caparos: Université Paris 8; Isabelle Blanchette: Université Laval
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".