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• “Can’t you see that we are in trouble?” – The environmental protection-related ignorance, its appearance in visual attentional patterns, and some possible explanation/interpretation

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  Péter Pajkossy

  Andrea Dúll

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  The environmental crisis is an outstanding topic nowadays. Given that it is basically caused
  by human activity, this issue is worth examining at all levels of society. The present study
  investigated the individuals’ visual attentional patterns and the possible attentional biases related to pictures displaying environmental problems, in comparison to undisturbed nature
  and social scenes as control stimuli, within the framework of a reaction-time task. Changes
  in participants’ mood and their self-reported environmental awareness were also measured.
  However, only the negative social scenes resulted attentional bias, the environmental topics
  were not able to do that. Albeit the mood of the participants deteriorated during the experiment,
  it did not have any correlation with any other variables, and either did the environmental
  awareness. We displayed the stimuli during the task only for a short period of time, thereby we
  targeted to reach automatic attentional responses. Our results reflect to the fact, that the topic
  of the environmental crisis is not suitable to do this. This phenomenon propounds the demand of
  explanations behind this phenomenon (like the possible evolutionary background).