Posted on 08/15/2005 7:57:02 PM PDT by CarrotAndStick
Researchers have finally found evidence for what good Catholic boys have known all along – erotic images make you go blind.
According to a report in New Scientist, the research has added to road-safety campaigners' calls to ban sexy billboard-advertising near busy roads, in the hope of preventing accidents.
The new study by US psychologists found that people shown erotic or gory images frequently fail to process images they see immediately afterwards. And the researchers say some personality types appear to be affected more than others by the phenomenon, known as "emotion-induced blindness".
David Zald, from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and Marvin Chun and colleagues from Yale University in Connecticut, showed hundreds of images to volunteers and asked them to pick a specific image from the rapid sequence.
Most of the images were landscape or architectural scenes, but the psychologists included a few emotionally charged images, portraying violent or sexually provocative scenes.
The closer these emotionally charged images occurred prior to the target image, the more frequently people failed to spot the target image, the researchers found.
"We observed that people failed to detect visual images that appeared one-fifth of a second after emotional images, whereas they can detect those images with little problem after neutral images," Zald says.
"We think there is essentially a bottleneck for information processing and if a certain type of stimulus captures attention, it can jam up the bottleneck so subsequent information can't get through," Zald explains.
"It appears to happen involuntarily. The stimulus captures attention and once allocated to that particular stimulus, no other stimuli can get through" for several tenths of a second.
why is my screen blank?
Can I look til I need glasses???
I'll take my chances...
I came, I saw, I posted.
Uh, aren't these in the wrong order?
So, what is the real reason I have to shave my palms? Which, by the way, is hard to do with the coke bottle glasses I have to wear......
Ah, so that's how Bill went from Hillary to Monica!
I can't see for hours after an FR Kornikova thread
Oh that's just great! I always heard "never make a pretty woman your wife", but did I listen? Oh no, of course not ... now I'm gonna go blind!
"why is my screen blank?"
What screen?
LOL
between sexy images and Viagra I'm gonna be REALLY blind when I am in my 50s and 60s...!!!
Are yo trying to tell me something? LOL
Try 30s. LOL
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You're welcome.
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