How preschoolers perceive danger – A study of inattentional bias

ABSTRACT Harmful threats can sometimes appear unexpectedly in the lives of young children, whose limited experience leads to a greater risk of endangerment. The current study adapted the Variant Odd Ball protocol to explore the effects of threat and familiarity on inattentional blindness (IB). This research evaluated reactions to presentations of evolutionarily relevant images such as millipedes, snakes, escargots, and snails, compared with reactions to evolutionarily irrelevant images such as syringes, knives, flashlights, and spoons. Respondents included three hundred and forty 4–5-year-old preschool children. The findings were as follows: (1) The property of familiarity plays an important role in preschool children’s IB to both evolutionarily relevant and irrelevant images, and highly familiar images were easier to detect than less familiar images; (2) the manipulation of images showed that the threat-relevant stimuli were not more likely to be detected than the non-threat-relevant stimuli; (3) no significant difference was found between the detection rates of evolutionarily relevant and irrelevant images. Preschool children have a lower detection rate of threat-relevant images (e.g., snake, knife) which may reflect their limited experience of danger and weaker integration of these threat-relevant images in the current study.