The effect of unusualness on the functional field of view in unsafe scenes^*

* This study is part of the first author’s doctoral thesis and was presented at the 31st International Congress of Psychology, Kanagawa, Japan, in July 2016.

ABSTRACT

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of unusualness of visually presented unsafe items on the functional field of view. In each experiment, after presenting a word indicating a certain context, we presented a picture including a safe or unsafe daily-life item. Participants were asked to identify a target digit that was briefly presented at the periphery immediately after the picture disappeared. Unusualness was manipulated by varying the incongruency between the item and the word, irrespective of the unsafety of the item. The affective habituation was controlled by using between-participants (Experiment 1) and within-block designs (Experiment 2) for the unsafety manipulation. Target identification accuracy was impaired by the incongruency when the items were unsafe, but this impairment was removed by the affective habituation. These results suggest that unusualness and unsafety have a role in the shrinkage of the functional field of view.

KEYWORDS:

• Functional field of view
• weapon focus effect
• unusualness
• unsafety

Acknowledgements

We thank Daiichiro Kuroki for technical assistance and Tomomi Uchiyama for comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

* This study is part of the first author’s doctoral thesis and was presented at the 31st International Congress of Psychology, Kanagawa, Japan, in July 2016.

1 A post-hoc power analysis with G*Power showed that the observed power was .992. This value met a reliable criterion of power .8 (Cohen, 1992).

2 One may be interested in comparing the identification accuracy between different contexts (e.g., “threat” vs. “cooking”). However, we cannot perform the comparison because the identification accuracy can be influenced not only by contexts but also target eccentricity. In the present experiments, the context was counterbalanced across different eccentricities.

3 Because the dwell times did not follow a Gaussian distribution (D = .141, p < .001), we used log-transformed dwell times.

4 A post-hoc power analysis with G*Power showed that the observed power is .753. This value was similar to a reliable criterion of power .8.

5 Because the dwell times did not follow a Gaussian distribution (D = .19, p < .001), we used log-transformed dwell times as in Experiment 1.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported in part by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [KAKENHI: grant number JP15K17327].