Nudity blinds

Fury and beauty are blinded, folk wisdom says. Advertisers to attract attention and “disconnecting” unnecessary critical thoughts have long been used to using images of a beautiful female body. There are cases when shocking advertising on highways led to accidents. And now American researchers have come to the conclusion that all these are not just isolated cases and figures of speech, but also scientifically sound truth. This is evidenced by the results of a series of experiments performed by the employee of the Institute of the Brain at the University of Vanderbiltov David Zald and the psychologists from Yale University Stephen Most, Marvin Chun and David Vidders. These experiments made it possible to establish that it is more difficult for a person to accurately identify objects that fall in his field of view, if he immediately receives shocking information before that.

Psychologists have long proved that our brain, unlike the camera, unconsciously filters visual images and, first of all, records their fragments that cause a strong emotional reaction. Such focusing attention is called Mental Rubbernecing, which literally from English means "mental stretching of the neck." David Zald and his colleagues found that this neuropsychological mechanism acts in the opposite direction - the emotional load can not only focus on, but also dull. By analogy, they came up with the term Attentional Rubbernecing for this feature of the human psyche - something like “temporary blocking of attention”. However, the authors of the article in the August issue of Psychonomic Bulletin and Review also use a more accurate name - “Emotion -enduced Blindness).

During the experiment, its participants showed hundreds of pictures that quickly replaced each other on a computer display. For the most part, these were photographs of natural and city landscapes, but there were also scenes of rudeness and violence, which in the vast majority of people cause an acute negative emotional reaction. The subjects were asked to celebrate photos with pre -agreed features as soon as they appear before their eyes. These pictures were sometimes preceded by quite neutral images, and sometimes “pathological”. And then the tendency of perception of visual images, which was called Attentional Rubbernecing, was manifested. The subjects easily found the required pictures if they were shown emotionally neutral personnel immediately before that. But when unpleasant scenes appeared on the screen, the subjects lost the ability to recognize the specified objects for a short time. Such "blinding" was very short, its average length did not exceed the fifth lobe of a second, but it arose quite regularly. Pictures of erotic content had exactly the same effect.

The next series of experiments was organized more sophisticated. Their participants were shown the same photographs as at the first stage, but now some personnel were turned 90 degrees in relation to the display frame. As before, shocking pictures flashed among neutral images. The subjects were asked to highlight either only “wrong” pictures of buildings, or the turned images of not only houses, but also natural landscapes. The experimenters believed that in the first case, where the selection rules were formulated more rigidly, it would be easier for observers to overcome the effect of emotionally induced blindness. However, this hypothesis was justified only partially. Some participants in the experiment were really less common when narrowing the choice of search objects, but some malfunctions arose with almost the previous frequency.

Having accumulated this information, psychologists decided to find out why the narrowing of the selection criterion helped one and did not help others. It turned out that the whole thing is in the psychotype. Those of the subjects who were not afraid of unpleasant conflicts, more precisely, concentrated attention on the completion of the assignment and therefore demonstrated the best results when narrowing the criterion for choosing objects. But cautious and cowardly individuals, on the contrary, did not benefit anything from such clarification.

Here's how David Zald and his colleagues interpret their results. In their opinion, negative incentives act as shields that block the channels of mental processing of visual information. This effect is involuntary in the sense that a person does not want and not even realize it, the brain acts in autonomous mode. The tendency to indecision and fearfulness enhances this emotionally induced blindness, while courage and determination facilitate its overcoming. Such an explanation seems quite believable, but how much it corresponds to the truth, remains to be found out.

Sources:

Most, SB, Chun, MM, Widders, DM, Zald, DH

Attendation Rubbernecing: Involuntary Attenation to Emotionally Negative Pictures Induces Blindness for Targets

Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, August 2005

Violent or Erotic Images Cause Momentary Periods of "Emotion -induced Blindness" - Vanderbilt University