The study authors were inspired in part by previous research which has demonstrated that our brains (and other parts of our body) respond to stimuli that we aren’t consciously aware of.
In other studies this effect has been tied to a simple evolutionary argument, that to survive we have to be aware of our environment and “sense” things like predators, or potential mates, lurking around the corner (that’s more the predators than the mates, potential mates shouldn’t be lurking if they’re doing it properly).
In order to measure how well people attend to things they can’t consciously see, the researchers used a technique called interocular suppression, which allows them to make images invisible to the eye, yet presumably perceptible nonetheless. Participants were given a visual attention test, and during the test the researchers flashed both neutral and erotic subliminal images. They then gave participants a visual task to assess where their attention was drawn to.
They report that their results show a gender and sexual orientation effect on attention. Essentially the researchers claim that heterosexuals were more likely to attend to the area where an erotic image of someone of the opposite sex was presented to them, and that homosexual men were more likely to attend to the area where an erotic image of someone of the same sex was presented to them.
Not surprisingly, they claim that bisexual women are somewhere in the middle.
The researchers make a point of saying in the paper that this research could not be used to determine a person’s sexual orientation, which of course has led the media to ask if it actually could be put to this use. The question is fair since the paper gives a mixed message. On the one hand they claim strong findings, and results that confirm the most simplistic gender and sexual orientation stereotypes. They don’t highlight the ambiguity in the results or the vast individual differences, and they fail to address the many limitations of the study. But they chose to comment on this one limitation, which seems strange.
Either way, since the paper could result in a string of queries about the newest visual test to tell if you’re straight or gay, it’s worth taking a closer look at the methodology and reporting in the paper.
For starters, the researchers only did the experiment on ten subjects per group (10 straight men, 10 straight women, 10 gay men, 10 gay/bisexual women). While they determined the sexual orientation of the last two groups using the Kinsey scale, they don’t seem to have used any scale to insure that their heterosexual participants were actually straight (but I guess that’s fine, no one lies about being straight, do they?) There’s also no explanation of why they choose gay men, but bisexual/gay women. I think they have lesbians in Minnesota, but I should check with an expert. These problems with their sample make the kinds of claims they are making very problematic.
Then there is the problem of the actual data. It’s hard to be specific because the researchers don’t post the numbers, but if you look at the figures the offer, it actually doesn’t appear as if people’s attention is so clear cut:
- 4 of the 10 “heterosexual” male participants actually paid more attention when they saw male and female erotic images, not just the female ones.
- 6 of the 10 “heterosexual” women participants paid more attention when they saw male and female erotic images, not just male erotic images.
But in their reporting they claim a strong effect. It’s true that statistically they found one, but looking at the data shows more than anything that individual differences will be great.
Another strange result in the study was that when they ran the same experiment but let participants actually see the images, there was no difference in participants’ attention. They were no more likely to look at the area where they saw erotic images than where they saw neutral images. The researcher’s don’t really address this and suggest it might be because participants were looking at visible erotic images for too long? But the length of time was less than one second, which hardly seems long enough to bore your average undergraduate student.
There is also the interesting question (which the researchers don’t address) about what’s in an image. I’m always amazed that research like this fails to account for the meaning of an image, as if one image of a naked man or woman is the same as any other. As if the physical pose, the colors, the body type, the hair style, the background, don’t have an impact. It’s true that these images were selected from a tool that is used and has been validated, but a visual tool that was validated five years ago may not be as valid today. And without understanding something of the meaning of sexual imagery for the participants it’s hard to make any meaning of these results.
For example, what if all the male participants were strongly religious, and are triggered in a different way by nudity than all the female participants. Individual responses to sexual stimuli are incredibly complicated, and none of this is accounted for by the authors of this study.
Finally, and not of least importance, we have to remember that this is correlational research and as such research like this could never result in a conclusion that attention type A means your gay, or straight, or bisexual, or you like clowns.
In fact their findings in no way offer any sort of orientation test, and I would argue that what their findings show more than anything is that there is huge individual difference in the way we respond to erotic images. This seems to be evidence that such a test would simply never work.
Beyond this particular study, the concept of a test to determine sexual orientation is anywhere between reductive and ludicrous. Neither the medical science nor the social science community has come anywhere near producing a body of work that could concretely define something like sexual orientation. Research for the “gay gene” is equally problematic, and of course still hasn’t yielded a single identifiable gene that holds markers for sexual orientation.
While this study wasn’t really “about” sexual orientation I think it does a good job of pointing out how little we continue to know about orientation. The fact that these researchers (and others) rely on the Kinsey scale, a methodology that is over fifty years old, I think highlights how little insight we’ve gained into sexual orientation since the 50s.
Source:
Jiang, Y., Costello, P., Fang, F., Hunag, M., and He, S. "A Gender and Sexual Orientation-Dependent Spatial Attentional Effect of Invisible Images" PNAS Early Edition (October 23, 2006). Accessed October 23, 2006.