Summary: Researchers report that when people are sexually objectified, observers may visually process them in a way more similar to how they process inanimate objects.
Source: University of Vienna.
Researchers have proposed that sexually objectified individuals—women or men depicted with emphasis on sexual body parts—are visually processed in ways more akin to objects than to whole persons. Though controversial and debated, a collaborative team from the University of Vienna, the University of Trieste, and SISSA investigated when and how this effect arises.
The main findings appear in the journal PLOS ONE.
The contested idea, known as the Sexualized Body Inversion Hypothesis (SBIH), suggests that sexualized portrayals of people encourage a body-part–focused processing style that resembles how observers perceive objects rather than whole human bodies. Critics have questioned this hypothesis on methodological grounds. To address those concerns, the research team designed a set of four experiments to examine the visual and perceptual conditions under which the effect occurs, and to identify factors that might drive or moderate it.
The study
The researchers used a standard visual-matching paradigm to measure the inversion effect—the common finding that faces and bodies are harder to recognize when shown upside down than when upright, a sign of configural or holistic processing. If sexualized people are processed more like objects, the inversion effect should be reduced or absent for sexualized human images compared with non-sexualized human images.
Across the experiments the investigators compared three stimulus categories: sexualized human targets, non-sexualized (personalized) human targets, and real objects (including mannequins and houses used as control stimuli). They manipulated low-level visual properties of the images—most notably symmetry and the spatial arrangement of body parts—to test whether such perceptual features could account for differences in inversion effects between stimulus types.
The results showed that image symmetry moderated the inversion effect. When stimuli were asymmetric—meaning there were clear left-right differences in limb positions or other bodily features—recognition performance was relatively easy both upright and inverted, and the inversion effect was diminished regardless of whether the target was sexualized. In other words, asymmetry tended to reduce inversion costs across categories, suggesting that low-level perceptual cues can make images easier to identify in any orientation.
Importantly, when the researchers controlled for symmetry and made the images equally easy to perceive, a key difference emerged. For very symmetrical images, non-sexualized (personalized) human bodies still showed the expected inversion effect, indicating holistic processing. In contrast, sexualized human targets did not produce an inversion effect under these controlled conditions, mirroring the pattern seen for object stimuli. This pattern supports the SBIH prediction that, under some conditions, sexualized people are processed more like objects.
To explore the visual strategies that might underlie these differences, the team used eye-tracking in one experiment. Eye-tracking data revealed that observers looked at sexualized targets differently: participants made fewer fixations to the face region for sexualized images than for non-sexualized images. This shift in gaze away from the face toward other body regions could help explain why sexualized figures are processed less configurally and more like isolated parts, reducing inversion effects.
Source: Giorgia Silani, University of Vienna
Publisher: Neuroscience news coverage organized by NeuroscienceNews.com
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is in the public domain.
Original Research: Open-access article “Understanding the mechanisms behind the sexualized-body inversion hypothesis: The role of asymmetry and attention biases” by Carlotta Cogoni, Andrea Carnaghi, Aleksandra Mitrovic, Helmut Leder, Carlo Fantoni, and Giorgia Silani published in PLOS ONE on April 5, 2018.
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0193944
Abstract
Understanding the mechanisms behind the sexualized-body inversion hypothesis: The role of asymmetry and attention biases
The Sexualized Body Inversion Hypothesis (SBIH) proposes that sexualized depictions of people are processed in a manner similar to inanimate objects, indicated by a lack of the inversion effect typically seen for faces and bodies. This research program used a modified visual-matching task across four experiments to test the core assumption of SBIH and to identify perceptual and attentional mechanisms that could explain it. Experiments 1 and 2 included personalized non-sexualized images and two object control conditions (mannequins and houses). Results showed an inversion effect for personalized human bodies and mannequins, but not for sexualized humans and houses. Experiment 3 explored whether image asymmetry could explain these differences and provided evidence that asymmetry moderates the inversion effect: asymmetrical stimuli produced smaller inversion effects regardless of sexualization. Experiment 4 employed eye-tracking to examine viewing strategies and found that sexualized stimuli elicited fewer face fixations, suggesting an attentional bias away from faces and toward sexualized body parts. Together, these findings indicate that both low-level perceptual features (such as asymmetry) and attention allocation contribute to when and how sexualized humans are visually processed more like objects. The results are discussed in relation to theories of sexual objectification and visual perception.