ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 2, Spring 2015
ases; fundamentally, to be attractive is to be attention-attracting. Attentional biases
are mechanisms that motivate us to preferentially direct our attention to environmental
cues that, in ancestral environments, were associated with positive fitness outcomes.
For example, many predators and toxic animals have distinctive patterns (e.g., spots,
stripes), and individuals who preferentially attended to such cues would have reaped
huge fitness rewards by avoiding predation. The properties of these cues – such as the
bright,