Automatic Distraction by Sexual Images: Gender Differences

Abstract

Sexual stimuli are thought to be highly salient and have been shown to automatically attract attention at the cost of processing other stimuli. We examined whether this effect was greater for men and whether men would show a category-specific effect with greater effects due to female images than male images. In two studies, participants performed a simple perceptual task while trying to ignore a distractor stimulus that could have sexual or neutral content. As expected, sexual stimuli produced a slowing of decision times under all conditions. The effect of erotic stimuli was greater for men (Experiment 1) and was category-specific (Experiment 2) while the response of women was not category specific (Experiment 2). However, all indices of distraction showed poor levels of reliability. The results show that early automatic distraction from sexual images show both quantitative and qualitative gender differences.

Keywords

• sexual stimuli
• sexual-content-induced delay (SCID)
• distractibility
• gender differences