Rapid and accurate perception of threat information is a critical ability and a prerequisite to survive natural selection for humans. To investigate whether threatening stimuli, especially phylogenetic and ontogenetic threats, are processed automatically, we analyzed the visual mismatch negativity (vMMN, an event-related potential component reflecting automatic processing) elicited by the threats with a cross-modal oddball paradigm, where participants were required to focus on the auditory stimuli and ignore the visual stimuli in each block. In this study, neutral (non-threatening) images served as standard stimuli (80%), and phylogenetic (10%) and ontogenetic (10%) threat stimuli served as deviant stimuli when testing a large sample (N = 96) of healthy volunteers. Threat-related visual mismatch negativity (threat-vMMN) was obtained by subtracting the event-related potential (ERP) elicited by standard stimuli from that elicited by deviant stimuli. The results indicated that the vMMN can be elicited by threat information. More importantly, the phylogenetic threat information elicited larger threat-vMMN than ontogenetic threat information. These findings suggest that perception of threat information was automatic, providing an evidential basis for the attentional advantages of survival processing. That is, automatic perception of phylogenetic threats has a particular evolutionary origin.
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