Development of a Cued Pro- and Antisaccade Paradigm: An Indirect Measure to Explore Automatic Components of Sexual Interest

To What Extent Do Erotic Images Elicit Visuospatial versus Cognitive Attentional Processes? Consistent Support for a (Non-Spatial) Sexual Content-Induced Delay

“…However, while latencies faster than 200ms suggested that this interference rests on an automatic, not deliberately controlled process, one important difference to our current approach is that these prosaccades were not spontaneous, i.e., participants were not free to direct their visuospatial attention wherever they felt. Strikingly, the corresponding difference measure in Oberlader et al (2017) indicating sexual-relevance of stimulus categories was also positively associated with a self-reported sex drive measure (r = .29, p < .03). Future research might enhance a better understanding on this differentiation between prompted and unprompted automatic processes.…”

“…This cognitive distraction is what we termed a SCID-like effect in the present paper. One notable exception that is clearly not just based on cognitive distraction but has an automatic visuospatial component is the Cued Pro-and Antisaccade Paradigm (CPAP; Oberlader et al, 2017). In this paradigm, men (but not women) were faster to follow the instruction to execute a prosaccade to a sexually preferred target.…”

The Effects of Acute Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on Attentional Bias in Pedophilic Disorder: A Preregistered Pilot Study

“…It also is conceivable that one of the two tasks was more apt than the other to detect an automatic attention bias, thus explaining some of the inconsistency between outcome measures. Both the antisaccade test and viewing time‐based measures have been successfully employed in the indirect assessment of sexual interest (21,13). However, other protocols, such as the Choice Reaction Time task (CRT) (14) and the Approach–Avoidance Task (AAT) (64), also have been proposed.…”

“…In this task, respondents are instructed to look toward or away from certain stimuli, and it is expected that stimulus content will influence their saccades (20). In healthy men, faster and more accurate saccades toward sexually preferred relative to nonpreferred stimuli as well as more accurate saccades away from sexually nonpreferred relative to preferred stimuli have been observed (21). In sum, prior evidence suggests that viewing times (12,13) as well as saccade latency and accuracy (22,23) can be used to detect an automatic attention bias for sexually preferred stimuli.…”

Testing Causal Explanations of Viewing Time Measures of Sexual Interests

“…Over the last 25 years, numerous studies have shown that individuals' unobtrusively measured viewing times are prolonged for sexually preferred (versus non-preferred) stimuli when they are instructed to rate pictures of persons in terms of their subjectively perceived sexual attractiveness (e.g., Banse et al, 2010;Dawson et al, 2012;Ebsworth & Lalumière, 2012;Harris et al, 1996;Israel & Strassberg, 2009;Jahnke et al, 2021;Larue et al, 2014;Lippa, 2017;Oberlader et al, 2017;Petterson et al, 2018;Rönspies et al, 2015;Quinsey et al, 1996;Xu et al, 2017). This basic finding-in the literature commonly referred to as viewing time (VT) effect-is so robust, that it is frequently used as an easy-to-apply latency-based indirect measure of individual differences in sexual interests, particularly, in forensic contexts where self-report measures are not the most viable option due to positive self-presentation concerns (Schmidt & Banse, in press; for systematic overviews see Pedneault et al, 2021;Schmidt et al, 2017).…”