What You Don’t Know You Know
Tuesday, January 2, 2007
Even if you don’t know it, your brain clocks things like naked ladies and muggers at breakneck speed.
Made you look! A naked body, flashed for an instant over on the left side of the screen, pulled your attention over there, didn’t it?
OK, actually there was no image over there. But if this website had the technological prowess that a recent psychology study did, we could have flashed erotic photos before your eyes. And you would’ve tended to look toward or away from these pictures of men and women in the buff, depending on which sex you’re attracted to. You wouldn’t have even noticed the transgression because the trick works even if you aren’t conscious of seeing the images.
This type of research raises vexing questions about how our minds work. Such as how much of our surroundings do we take in and process without us being aware? We might glom onto sexy images, shy away from scenes of death and destruction, or suffer pangs of fear from harmless photos of snakes. And if our minds and brains can make decisions unconsciously—like, “Look over there! Hottie at 9 o’clock!"—are we just drones, pushed and pulled by deep-seated wants and fears?
It makes sense that we could have evolved to make snap decisions to look one way or another, says Sheng He, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota and leader of the subconscious naughty pics study. “You want to direct your attention to interesting or dangerous targets in your visual field,” He says. “If your brain can do that even before you become aware of it, that would certainly make it more advantageous.”
But showing that we actually do this is quite a task. Sheng and his colleagues used a special technique to keep people from becoming conscious of the naked pictures in their study, which appeared recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The images were flashed before people for just under one second, long enough for a person to normally be aware of them. But in the experiment, they presented them to only one eye, while the other eye saw a jumble of patches of bright colors. When the eyes feed these two images into the brain, the brain cells try to assemble a consistent picture of the surroundings—but they can’t, so they duke it out in a process called “binocular rivalry.” In He’s experiment, the noisy patches won, and the naked pics escaped notice.
Asking people what they saw revealed nothing. But the researchers could see where people’s attention was by giving them a quick test soon after each naked pictures flashed on screen. The test was simple: to say whether a pattern of lines was oriented up-and-down, or tilted off kilter. How quickly people respond to the test shows whether their attention happened to be on the spot where the pattern of lines appeared, or off somewhere else.
Straight men’s attention followed whichever side on which the naked lady appeared. Same was true for gay men with pictures of naked men. And vice versa for the ladies (although the results didn’t come out so clean for homosexual and bisexual women. He’s not sure why). Having some sort of response to the naked picture is probably unavoidable; “That part must be hardwired,” He says. But what kind of response a person has is probably influenced by society, he adds. In cultures with strong taboos against showing some skin, for example, naked photos of either sex may be repulsive to some—or especially captivating to others. Experiments like He’s reveal how much work our minds are doing below the surface. “What’s really elegant about the study and his colleagues is they show that this happens even if you’re not even aware—especially if you’re not even aware—of what it is that’s grabbing your attention,” says psychologist Steven Most of the University of Delaware, who also studies how fleeting images influence our minds. “These influences over attention and perception happen at a preconscious level, which is extraordinary.”
Erotic images aren’t the only ones that grab attention so strongly. “Mutilated bodies and spiders also rated very high,” He says. It’s just those kinds of disturbing images that Most used in a recent study to show an effect he calls “attentional rubbernecking.” Just like when you’re driving down a highway and you can’t help but take your eyes off the road to stare at an accident on the shoulder.
In Most’s study, which appeared last year in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, people watched a rapid-fire mix of images, and they had to look out for certain type of images - say, pictures of buildings. Subjects were aware of the various images they saw, and throwing in a disturbing image, like a mutilated body, made their attention hiccup, so that if an image of a building appears soon afterward, they miss it. The trick worked again when Most inserted photos of naked people. Subjects just couldn’t resist the lure of sexy pictures even with a performance-based reward of up to $90. So it seems that images we see, even fleetingly, play a game of subconscious tug-of-war on our attention that our willpower is largely helpless against.
But whether we find the curve of a breast or a man’s butt either entrancing or repulsive, Most’s studies suggest it will mess with our attention either way. If we’re all rubberneckers under the surface, maybe laws should take this into account. Sexy images on roadside billboards could be a traffic hazard; should we should ban them? On the other hand, Most’s studies found that people with highly anxious personalities were less likely to rein in their attention and avoid the affects of distracting images. If we can train ourselves to be less distractable, maybe it is not the billboard’s fault, but the nervous driver’s. Another hoop to jump on your driving test, maybe? No matter the legal consequences, this reserach reveals how underlying drives and motivations influence how we see the world. “We have this intuition that to see something, all we have to do is turn our eyes toward it and we’ll see what’s there,” Most says. But studies like He’s and Most’s show that this naive sense of how we perceive the world underestimates how much is going on before we become aware of what we see—or even things we never consiously notice at all.
posted by LeBlues @ 11:56 AM,
