Visual spatial attention to sexual stimuli

Snowden, Robert J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9900-480X, Kydd-Coutts, Megam, Varney, Ellie-May, Rosselli, Olivia and Gray, Nicola S. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3849-8118 2024. Visual spatial attention to sexual stimuli. Current Psychology 43 , pp. 27930-27943. 10.1007/s12144-024-06438-y

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Abstract

Visual events of high salience are thought to automatically attract visual processing resources to their location. Hence, we should expect that stimuli with sexual content should trigger such a movement of visual resources. However, evidence for such an allocation of visual resources is sparse and rather contradictory. In two studies we tested this hypothesis. Using a dot-probe task, Experiment 1 showed that targets occurring at the location of a briefly presented and uninformative cue (hence engaging “exogenous” attention) with sexual content were responded to more rapidly than those that occurred at the location of the neutral cue - thus confirming that sexual stimuli can attract automatic attention to their location. However, the effect was small and had a low level of reliability. No consistent gender differences were found. In Experiment 2, we examined whether this cueing effect remained even for low-visibility cues. No cueing effects were found, but the task manipulation also abolished the cueing effect for high visibility cues. While the study supports the notion of spatial allocation of visual resources to sexual stimuli, it highlights that this effect is not robust or reliable, and discusses the implications of this.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology
Publisher:	Springer
ISSN:	1046-1310
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	18 July 2024
Date of Acceptance:	17 July 2024
Last Modified:	02 Dec 2024 14:58
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/170658

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