Impaired Attentional Control in Pedophiles in a Sexual Distractor Task

Abstract

Pedophilic disorder, a subtype of paraphilia, is defined as a recurrent sexual interest in prepubescent children, which is characterized by persistent thoughts, fantasies, urges, sexual arousal, or behavior. Besides a deviant sexual preference, sexual preoccupation was found to be a dynamic risk factor for reoffending. Thus, it is conceivable that sex offenders and especially sex offenders against children have difficulties to control their responses to sexual stimuli. In the current study pedophiles, forensic and non-forensic control subjects had to solve a cognitive task, while sexual distractors were presented simultaneously. This kind of task also requires control functions. Therefore, data were analyzed with respect to attentional control while comparing eye movements toward sexual distractors and toward the cognitive task. We were mainly interested in how early (fixation latency) and late (relative fixation time) attentional processes were allocated to both, the cognitive target stimuli and the sexual distractors. Pedophiles demonstrated significantly lower attentional control in the sexual distractor task than both control groups (non-pedophiles). They showed a shorter fixation latency and longer fixation time for sexual distractors than non-pedophiles. Furthermore, pedophiles demonstrated a longer fixation latency and shorter fixation time for cognitive target stimuli. For classification analyses, an attentional control index (ACI) was built, i.e., the difference between eye movements on cognitive target stimuli and sexual distractors. For the ACI of early attentional processes, i.e., fixation latency, a good classification between pedophiles and non-pedophiles was found. We assumed that the measured attentional control represents inhibitory executive functions, specifically interference control. Further studies should examine if low attentional control in pedophiles is due to low motivation to solve the task or rather to a lack of ability to control attention with respect to sexual and/or neutral distractors. Prospectively, this design could be useful to generate hypotheses about clinical important aspects of controllability, the capacity of self-control, and the severity of a paraphilic disorder.

Are There Any Biomarkers for Pedophilia and Sexual Child Abuse? A Review

“…As discussed in Structural and Functional Imaging, a diminished fronto-limbic functional connectivity could be seen as a neurobiological correlate for an (generally) impaired ability to exert inhibitory control over behavior, which seems to be associated with child sexual offending. Furthermore, pedophilic CSOs also seem to have lower attentional control capacities than non-pedophilic controls, as was shown in a sexual distractor task with high discrimination accuary while measuring eye movements (120). Finally, the application of virtual reality approaches could be promising to examine a more realistic, inhibitory control behavior; for instance when confronting participants with children in a virtual supermarket (138).…”

“…In another experimental setting, a sexual distractor task, the same subjects had to solve a cognitive task while simultaneously being presented with an image of a sexual stimulus [child or adult stimulus (120)]. Hence, this task requires attentional control in the presence of sexual stimuli.…”

“…We assumed that the measured attentional control represents inhibitory executive functions, specifically interference control. Further studies will have to examine, if attentional control to sexual distractors could be linked to clinically important aspects of controllability, the capacity of self-control, and the severity of a paraphilic disorder (120). Applying the same cognitive task, outpatients with a selfreported sexual interest in children (and self-reported sexual offenses) differed from pedophilic forensic inpatients with respect to attentional control but not with regard to sexual interest (121).…”

Indirect and Neuropsychological Indicators of Pedophilia

“…The task takes advantage of the effect that sexually attractive imagery induces a sexual content-related delay to subsequent cognitive processes (Dombert et al, 2017;Geer & Bellard, 1996;Gress & Laws, 2009;Mokros et al, 2010). The relative preference for certain kinds of sexual stimuli is estimated by measuring the time it takes a participant to release attention from the image to perform the primary target detection task (for a different example of attention-based indirect tests, see Jordan et al, 2016).…”

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

“…It has been further suggested that this attention bias might be associated with impaired cognitive control over sexual responses (Jordan et al, 2016). In support of this, decreased activity in frontal regions such as the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) has been found in sex offenders with child victims (SOC) with PD compared to healthy controls, in response to sexual images (Mohnke et al, 2014;Poeppl et al, 2013;Walter et al, 2007).…”