Abstract
1 Introduction Recent studies show that sexually-objectified women are not only treated as sex objects but also visually processed similar to objects (local processing)[1,2]. However, Sexual objectification(SO) research has predominantly studied western society's perceptions, with few empirical studies examining other cultures. In this study, we explore SO of women in an Asian-Indian cultural/social setting using a novel design and stimuli representative of the culture. We conduct an eye tracking study that uses Navon local/global and body inversion[3] paradigms to investigate the gaze behavior and underlying visual processing when looking at non-sexualized male and female images. 2 Methods The study sample consists of Ninety-four (24 women, 70 men, age=18-27, mean=21, stdev=±2.1) undergraduate and graduate students. There are 20 trial blocks. Each trial block consists of a male/female image in upright/inverted orientation, off-centre to the screen for 7 seconds followed by a plus sign for 1 second, followed by a Navon letter identification task. The priming condition and Navon task are randomised to minimise confounding effects. The Navon image is a large letter made of small letters. The participants press 'B' if they identify either one of the target letters ('H'/‘O') either as a contour or a feature (the letter itself) otherwise press ‘N’. The classification of local/global recognition is implicit as the participants press the same key ‘B’ for both local and global images. We selected black and white male images(MI) and female images(FI) wearing casual attires like jeans/pant and top/shirt. The experiment is designed using Tobii Studio. Tobiix120 eye tracker is used to capture the gaze. We mark face, chest, hip as our Areas of Interest(AoIs) and calculate the fixation duration(FD), revisit frequency(RF), first fixation duration(FFD) for the AoIs. We define sexual body(SB) parts as sum of hip and chest AoIs. For gaze analysis, 5 participants data with poor sampling rate (below 40%) are excluded. We use Tukey Fence outlier detection method to remove outliers and removed 10 participants data for first fixation duration analysis. We measure Response Time(RT) as the time taken to press the key from the onset of the Navon image presentation. For RT analysis, we consider only the data points with at least one correct response in each priming condition, reducing our data to 59 participants. The alpha level for p-value is set to 0.05 in all tests. 3 Results There is a main effect of target (priming stimulus) gender and orientation on the FD and RF. • FD: Face FD of upright > inverted and SB parts FD of upright < inverted for both MI and FI. Face FD of FI < MI and SB parts FD of FI > MI in both upright and inverted orientation. Face FD > SB parts FD for all target images. • RF: Face RF of upright > inverted for both MI and FI. SB parts RF of inverted > upright for FI. Importantly, SB parts RF of FI > MI in upright and inverted orien-tation. Face RF < SB parts RF for all target images. • FFD: There is significant effect of orientation for FI but not for MI. Face FFD of upright FI > inverted FI and SB parts FFD of inverted FI > upright FI. • RT: Global recognition is faster in female priming for both orientations. Local recognition is faster in male priming, but the significance is found only for inverted image. The participant gender effect on RT is not significant. There is no significant correlation between local/global RT and FD. 4 Discussion Objectification theory states that women have a greater propensity to be sexually objectified than men do. This is evident from our data, female sexual body parts received greater attention than male sexual body parts and vice versa for face. However the visual attention is still greatest on the face for both male and female images, in line with [4,5,6,7,8]. As for global/local perception, non-sexualized males are processed similar to objects more than females. This is in contrast to[3,1,6] but find support in a study on Chinese population [9]. We can attribute our findings to the choice of the stimuli being personalised as against sexualized. There is a strong inversion effect on gaze, both gender images are more objectified in inverted than upright position but this doesn’t affect the underlying cognitive processing implying that the difference in the visual processing between objectified and non-objectified is more quantitative than qualitative. References 3) Bernard, P., Gervais, S. J., & Klein, O. (2018). Objectifying objectification: When and why people are cognitively reduced to their parts akin to objects. European Review of So-cial Psychology, 29(1), 82–121. 4) Bernard, P., Rizzo, T., Hoonhorst, I., Deliens, G., Gervais, S., B, Bayard, C., Deltenre, P., Colin, C., & Klein, O. (2018). The Neural Correlates of Cognitive Objectification. So-cial Psychological and Personality Science, 9, 550–559. 2) Bernard, P., Gervais, S. J., Allen, J., Campomizzi, S., & Klein, O. (2012). Integrating Sexual Objectification with Object Versus Person Recognition: The Sexualized-Body-Inversion Hypothesis. Psychological Science, 23(5), 469–471. 1) Bareket, O., Shnabel, N., Abeles, D., Gervais, S., & Yuval-Greenberg, S. (2019). Evi-dence for an Association between Men’s Spontaneous Objectifying Gazing Behavior and their Endorsement of Objectifying Attitudes toward Women. Sex Roles, 81(3–4), 245–256. 5) Cogoni, C., Carnaghi, A., Mitrovic, A., Leder, H., Fantoni, C., & Silani, G. (2018). Understanding the mechanisms behind the sexualized-body inversion hypothesis: The role of asymmetry and attention biases. PLOS ONE
