Ece Yucer¹ (), Kristina Knox¹, Tyler Puhlick¹, Jay Pratt¹; ¹University of Toronto

The ability to detect moving entities within our visual field is essential for human survival, as these entities often signal potential threats or opportunities. Animate beings, such as animals, exhibit dynamic and unpredictable movement patterns, making them highly salient to our visual attention system. This study seeks to explore the extent to which animacy influences saccadic eye movements using a forced-choice saccade task. In Experiment 1, an animal image and a real-world size-matched inanimate object image both from the THINGSPlus Database, grey-scaled and backgrounds removed, were presented simultaneously on a monitor. The participants completed a series of trials organized into four blocks, where they were instructed to focus their gaze, as quickly as possible, on the animate image during two blocks and on the inanimate object image during the other two blocks. Experiment 2 presented a single image at a time, either an animal or an object, with the same block trial structure. This allowed for a more precise comparison of reaction times between the two categories of objects without the potential decision-making implicated in simultaneous stimuli presentation. In both experiments, participants’ saccadic eye movements were recorded with an eye tracker. The results show that participants exhibited shorter saccadic reaction times when looking toward animate objects than their inanimate counterparts. Eye movement errors and amplitudes did not differ between the two types of stimuli. Overall, this indicates that our visual system is tuned to prioritize and quickly respond to potential living threats or opportunities in our environment, underscoring the importance of animacy in our attentional processes.