What is it about?
Plants are vital but often ignored. This study introduces HOPI, a visual test measuring attention to plants in natural scenes. Using eye-tracking and memory tasks, researchers found people often overlook individual plants, treating them as background rather than distinct objects, revealing rather low plant awareness.
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Photo by Jennifer Delmarre on Unsplash
Why is it important?
This is the first validated tool to measure attention towards plants. As biodiversity loss accelerates, understanding how people perceive plants is critical for environmental education and conservation. HOPI provides a transparent, replicable method to study and improve plant awareness, helping bridge the gap between human perception and ecological reality.
Perspectives
Developing the HOPI over two years was one of the most exciting, however exhausting, parts of my work. By publishing this tool, I hope to contribute to assessing plant awareness in a reliable way and reducing the reliance on using self-declaration instruments.
Peter Pany
University of Vienna
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Assessing attention towards plants: Development and first steps to the validation of the Hidden Object Picture Instrument (HOPI), PLOS One, May 2026, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0349383.
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