Testing Causal Explanations of Viewing Time Measures of Sexual Interests

Abstract

The term viewing time (VT) effect refers to a phenomenon whereby respondents typically take longer to judge the sexual attractiveness of targets from sexually preferred (versus nonpreferred) categories. Although frequently characterized as an unobtrusive measure of respondents’ sexually motivated reactions to the stimulus images themselves, the typical pattern of response times might be sufficiently explained by the task demands of the seemingly less relevant rating task. Utilizing three different VT variants, the present paper reports an experimental investigation (N = 136 heterosexual women and men) that tested hypotheses derived from hot stimulus-based processes versus cold cognitive task-based processes. Specifically, stimulus-based processes would predict VT effects even without a rating task, greater VT effects for sexually more suggestive images, and correlations of VT effects with individual sex drive differences. The task-based processes would not imply such predictions, but instead suggest identical response patterns for abstract non-pictorial stimuli that require the same feature integration. Results unanimously speak to the relevance of task demands but provide no support for stimulus-based processes. Implications of these findings for the causal explanation of VT effects are discussed.

Viewing Time Measures of Sexual Interest and Sexual Offending Propensity: An Online Survey of Fathers

“…In other words, we cannot directly discern whether some fathers gazed longer at child images because of their sexual interest in children or, rather, because those images were particularly surprising or disturbing. Since this interpretation is in contrast with the empirically supported cold cognitive processes explanation of VT effects (e.g., Schmidt et al, 2021), future VT studies involving fathers could help clarifying whether this explanation holds in fathers specifically.…”

“…In contrast, deliberative mate selection processes (i.e., cold cognitive processes) describes the delay as being explained by the length of time it takes to appraise the sexual attractiveness of the stimuli (i.e., feature-checking), with longer delay for attractive stimuli, as there are more features (e.g., gender, physical appearance) to be assessed than unattractive stimuli. Using variants of VTs, Schmidt et al (2021) found that VT effects could be explained by the cold cognitive process hypothesis that more information is required to process sexually preferred than non-preferred targets, resulting in longer VTs (see also Imhoff et al, 2012;Pohl et al, 2016).…”

“…While self-reports of sexual offending behavior may be ill-suited to reliably detect sexual interest in children in population samples, propensity measures seem more promising. Moreover, to replicate evidence that VT effects reflect cold cognitive processes rather than sexual arousal regulation problems (Schmidt et al, 2021) future studies should include indicators of sexual arousal regulation, such as frequency of sexual activity or sexual risk taking.…”