Innateness weirdness

Two new studies published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ingeniously add to the evidence that the mind has built-in proclivities about where to put its attention. The first found that people are more attentive to movements by animals than by cars and trucks. Even people who grew up around vehicles, in urban environments, were more likely to notice an animal's roadside movement than a car's. In the second, people's decisions about another person were affected by what others said -- even when the ``gossip'' added nothing to what they already knew.