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Now you see me, now you don’t: detecting sexual objectification through a change blindness paradigm

Cognitive Processing volume 20, pages419–429(2019)Cite this article

Abstract

The goal of this work is to provide evidence for the cognitive objectification of sexualized targets via a change blindness paradigm. Since sexual objectification involves a fragmented perception of the target in which individuating features (i.e., the face) have less information potential than sexualized features (i.e., body parts), we hypothesized that changes in faces of sexualized targets would be detected with less accuracy than changes in faces of nonsexualized targets. Conversely, we expected that changes in body parts would be detected with higher accuracy for sexualized than nonsexualized targets. These hypotheses were supported by the results of two studies that employed a change blindness task in which stimuli with changes both to faces and bodies of sexualized and nonsexualized images were presented. Unexpectedly, the hypothesized effects emerged both for female and male targets.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In both studies, the exclusion of non-heterosexual participants did not affect our pattern of findings.

  2. 2.

    The images were presented in a random position within the stimulus presentation area so that participants could not anticipate their exact occurrence in the display area.

  3. 3.

    In one-shot change detection tasks, participants’ performance is primarily measured via accuracy of response than response times that are instead primarily used in flicker tasks (see Rensink 2002).

  4. 4.

    In both studies, the distribution of the dependent variables in the conditions was negatively skewed. We thus repeated the analyses by transforming the data using the formula recommended in these cases by Tabachnick and Fidell (1996). The results were substantially the same (see the Supplementary Analyses), suggesting that little or no bias was introduced in using the original values.

  5. 5.

    In both studies, a similar pattern of findings emerged by employing signal detection analyses and d′ as a measure of performance that also considered no-change trials (see the Supplementary Analyses). We decided not to consider these analyses as the main statistical approach for our data because the complexity of our experimental design and the consequent high number of cells make our approach more reliable than the signal detection one, as the total frequency of the implied cross-tabulations that we considered to obtain d′s was relatively low. Secondly, we felt that reporting the signal detection analyses approach would make the Results section relatively difficult to follow and understand for the interested reader.

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Affiliations

  1. Department of Educational Science (DISFOR), University of Genova, Corso Podestà 2, 16128, Genoa, Italy
    • Luca Andrighetto
    • , Fabrizio Bracco
    • , Carlo Chiorri
    • , Michele Masini
    •  & Tommaso Francesco Piccinno
  2. Department of Educational Technologies, National Research Council, Genoa, Italy
    • Marcello Passarelli
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Correspondence to Luca Andrighetto.

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Andrighetto, L., Bracco, F., Chiorri, C. et al. Now you see me, now you don’t: detecting sexual objectification through a change blindness paradigm. Cogn Process 20, 419–429 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-019-00927-w

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Keywords

  • Sexual objectification
  • Change blindness
  • Objectifying gaze
  • Information potential