For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, wild animals generally represented either a food source or a potential danger. Detecting an animal’s immediate presence and then monitoring its movements was vital to the physical safety, nutrition, and well-being of stone-age families.Now a team of researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara has identified a nonconscious attention system, which still exists in the human brain, that maintains awareness of non-human animals and tracks changes in their location, behavior, and trajectory.

It’s strange to think that paying more attention to moving animals than moving cars is hard-wired into the brain, but that seems the case according to this study.

Read the rest at ScienceDaily.