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Monday August 15, 2005
Erotic Billboard Images a Traffic Hazard Study Shows
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NASHVILLE, August 15, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Research by US psychologists from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and from Yale University in Connecticut, have found that the sight of erotic images on billboard advertising can cause a brief moment of blindness that may constitute a traffic hazard. The study shows that some personality types are affected more than others and the moment of blindness is short, but could constitute a hazard while driving.
Volunteers were shown a rapid-fire series of images such as landscapes and architectural scenes, interspersed with violent or erotic images. When the erotic images were placed close together, the phenomenon, known as “emotion-induced blindness” was recorded more frequently.
“We observed that people failed to detect visual images that appeared one-fifth of a second after emotional images, whereas they can detect those images with little problem after neutral images,” said David Zald who headed the study.
“It appears to happen involuntarily,” said Zald. “The stimulus captures attention and once allocated to that particular stimulus, no other stimuli can get through.” The blindness typically lasted several tenths of a second. That brief moment could be crucial in heavy urban traffic which invariably features multiple advertisements involving sexually explicit images.
A spokeswoman from Brake, a UK road safety organisation said, “We should be concerned if drivers are experiencing split-second breaks in concentration, which could result in an accident or death on the roads.”
Read coverage in NewScientist:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7845
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