ABSTRACT The 4 experiments reported here used the preferential looking and habituation paradigms to examine whether 5-month-olds possess a perceptual template for snakes, sharks, and rodents. It was predicted that if infants possess such a template, then they would attend preferentially to schematic images of these nonhuman animal stimuli relative to scrambled versions of the same stimuli. The results revealed that infants looked longer at a schematic snake than at 2 scrambled versions of the image and generalized from real snakes to the schematic image. The experiments also demonstrated that 5-month-olds showed no preferential looking for schematic sharks or schematic rodents relative to scrambled versions of those images. These data add to the growing support for the view that humans, like many nonhuman animals, possess an evolved fear mechanism for detecting threats that were recurrent across evolutionary time.

中文翻译：

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5 个月大的婴儿是否具有进化的蛇、鲨鱼和老鼠检测机制？

摘要 这里报告的 4 个实验使用优先观察和习惯范式来检查 5 个月大的婴儿是否拥有蛇、鲨鱼和啮齿动物的感知模板。据预测，如果婴儿拥有这样的模板，那么他们会优先关注这些非人类动物刺激的示意图，而不是相同刺激的混杂版本。结果表明，婴儿看图解蛇的时间比看图像的 2 个打乱版本的时间更长，并从真正的蛇概括到图解图像。实验还表明，相对于这些图像的乱序版本，5 个月大的孩子没有表现出偏好寻找图解鲨鱼或图解啮齿动物。这些数据增加了对人类与许多非人类动物一样，