Beat you by ten seconds. :)
-Dan
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.
-Dan
10 seconds. But do we hear a chorus of "Thank You"s? Noooooooo...
OMG! They think Helen Thomas is sexy?!
Save my sight & lose my lunch.
Hmm... according to this, it looks like the study didn't have the proper controls. All it showed was that our brain processing "skips" every time we see a picture of a person. Instead of alternating landscape scenes with "emotionally charged" pictures of people (comparing apples and oranges), the researchers should have alternated pictures of people in neutral poses vs. people in provocative or violent poses. (Of course, the researchers might have included the necessary controls, but the article didn't bother mentioning it.)
LOL.. Nice
lol
[Freepmail me to get on or off this Not-A-Ping-List.]
And how big of a chunk a change did we spend to figure this little gem out? Oh bother where for art thou?
Thank you. That reversed all the negative affects.
deceptive title - it isn't the eyes that are affected, but the processor
OTOH, this supports my long-standing contention that well-constructed women should not be permitted to exercise on or within line-of-sight of heavy-use roads during rush-hour. (Ya shoulda seen the accidents on St Charles in New Orleans during my seven years there)
Ow. My eyes my eyes!!!!
I'm a big boy, I can take the pain! Bring it on!
That explains it.
Yes, but that is only if you look at ugly people!!!
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