When right side up is upside down: Vertical attention bias tracks interactive feature regularities in upright and inverted images.

Abstract

We previously proposed a Vertical Attention Bias (VAB) that directs attention toward object tops and scene bottoms and robustly confirmed this effect in both adults and 4- to 7-year-old children. Our past findings are consistent with progressive ecological theory, and support that our perceptual biases are coupled to informative environmental regularities. This leads observers to generally favor a downward gaze to facilitate attending more to functionally and behaviorally relevant locations. Here, we examine orientation effects using upright or inverted images presented in triptych sets to further test the overall VAB pattern. Participants made similarity judgments between a central target image of an object or scene and flanking images containing either the same top-half or the same bottom-half as the target image. Experiment 1 presented upright triptych images and replicated past VAB findings. Experiment 2 presented the same triptychs in an inverted orientation. In this context, the environmental regularity of interactive feature placement is incongruent with conventional spatial location in the presented image. Here object and scene tops are positioned in the lower image portion, and bottoms in the upper image portion. Results extend previous findings and confirm that VAB effects favoring object tops and scene bottoms flip along with the inverted image, though statistically weaker. Taken together, the findings support that the typical vertical interactive feature imbalance in real-world stimuli drives a generic downward vantage tendency. This directs attention toward the locations of meaningful, behaviorally relevant environmental aspects, which helps focus attention on personal action space and body-level affordances.