Nature Catches the Eye – Human Gaze Behaviour as a Detector of Spontaneous Visual Attention

Featuring wide and open spaces, scattered high trees and a sufficient amount of water, the African savanna constituted the environment in which early hominids developed bipedal locomotion and increased the size of both brain and social groups. Until today, the human species is thought to be adapted to the savanna habitat and to have evolved a strong preference for natural environments. Based on the widely accepted savanna hypothesis and biophilia hypothesis, studies showed that in comparison to modern, man-made environments, natural ones are preferred. By using an electrooculogram, we investigated whether this preference already manifests in unconscious differential gaze behaviour in a laboratory study setting. 64 participants were confronted with 20 pairs of pictures, each consisting of a modern, man-made stimulus and of a natural stimulus. Stimuli were chosen so they matched in size, color and function of the depicted item. Stimuli were presented in random order for a duration of two seconds per pair. Other than previous studies, our participants weren’t told to rank or rate those stimuli, but just to look at them. Our results show that the natural stimuli were looked at longer than the artificial ones. These results remain stable when controlled for sex, age and environmental preferences of our subjects. This indicates that the differential gaze behavior is triggered by involuntary and subconscious processes.