[wordup] Evolution Explains Why Lolcats Control Your Mind

[Adam Shand]

Source: http://io9.com/347041/evolution-explains-why-lolcats-control-your-mind

Evolution Explains Why Lolcats Control Your Mind
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: loldoctorwho.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 23003 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.spack.org/pipermail/wordup/attachments/20080124/55436a80/attachment.jpg 
-------------- next part --------------

If you're distracted by lolcats at work all day, new evidence from  
evolutionary biology suggests it's not your fault. Human visual  
attention evolved thousands of years ago to track the movements of  
animals, and even today people are far more distracted by images  
involving changes in animals than they are by images of inert Mac  
laptops or moving cars. This research, conducted by psychologists at  
Yale, goes a long way towards explaining the bizarrely mesmerizing  
effect of lolcats, despite the fact that there are plenty of other  
funny, cute things out there on the Web.

A report on the Yale study explains:

What our eyes look at is guided by brain mechanisms that pick out some  
portions of a scene over others. Since keeping an eye on predators and  
prey was important during our evolution, Joshua New and colleagues  
investigated whether animals, both human and otherwise, are more  
likely to grab our visual attention. The researchers showed subjects  
pairs of photographs of natural scenes in rapid alternation, with the  
second photograph including a single change. As predicted, subjects  
were faster and more accurate detecting changes involving animals than  
inanimate objects. If experience were producing this bias, then people  
should also be good at detecting changes involving automobiles, which  
as drivers and pedestrians they have been trained all their lives to  
monitor for sudden, life-or-death changes in trajectory. Yet subjects  
were much slower in detecting changes to vehicles than to more rarely  
experienced animal species, indicating that learning is not the source  
of this difference. The bias for animals, the authors conclude, is  
like the appendix: present in modern humans because it was useful for  
our ancestors, even if useless now. What's great about this research  
is that it inadvertently targeted exactly what's happening in lolcat  
images: the animal has been changed from being just a regular cute  
kitty, to being a cute kitty with special attributes created by the  
caption. So a lolcat is an animal image with "a single change."

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: dunecat.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 91920 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.spack.org/pipermail/wordup/attachments/20080124/55436a80/attachment-0001.jpg 
-------------- next part --------------



I really want to see a study that specifically looks at what happens  
to our brains while looking at pictures of lolcats to see exactly what  
part of the brain lights up when I can haz a cheezburger.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: lolcloverfieldor9.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 75139 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.spack.org/pipermail/wordup/attachments/20080124/55436a80/attachment-0002.jpg 
-------------- next part --------------