Matthew Langley¹ (), Madelaine Vu¹, Michael McBeath^1,2; ¹Arizona State University, ²Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics

Introduction: A robust Vertical Attention Bias (VAB) that directs attention toward tops of objects and bottoms of scenes was recently proposed and confirmed in both adults and 4-7 year-old children. This bias is consistent with Affordance Theory in that observers favor attending to the more informative locations of intentionality and functionally in the environment (locations relevant to our limbs and effectivities), such that we generally adopt a downward gaze. In the current analysis, we examine the effects of generic directionality by manipulating the vertical orientation of presented stimuli and test for an overall pattern of VAB for both object and scene images. Method: Participants observed picture triptychs and made similarity judgments between a central target object or scene and flanking comparison images that contained the same top- vs same bottom-half as the target image. Experiment 1 presented picture triptychs in an upright orientation, and Experiment 2 the same triptychs in an inverted upside-down orientation. This manipulated the affordance location, such that object tops were now positioned in the lower half of the image, and scene bottoms in the upper half of the image. Results: Results replicated past findings confirming a VAB for object tops and scene bottoms that varies as a function of informative aspects of visually attended stimuli. Here Experiment 1 followed the previous pattern while the results of Experiment 2 were inverted and somewhat weaker. Conclusion: The findings support our hypothesis that the VAB is driven by the regularity of affordance location. The overall VAB pattern for upside-down stimuli was maintained, though statistically weaker than for an upright orientation, particularly for object images. Taken together, the findings support that vertical information imbalance drives a generic downward vantage tendency that focuses attention on personal action space and body-level affordances.