Emotional Blindness

Researchers have proved what mothers have been telling their sons all along - erotic images can make you go blind.

A new study by US psychologists found people shown erotic or gory images could not process what they were seeing immediately afterwards.

Researchers believe emotion-induced blindness could mean drivers simply do not see another car or pedestrian if they have just witnessed an "emotionally charged" scene.

The work, published in the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, helps shed light on how motorists are affected by the use of sexy billboards.

It also found that some people were more prone to be affected by the phenomenon known as emotion-induced blindness.

Researchers from Vanderbilt University in Nashville and Yale University in Connecticut showed hundreds of images to volunteers.

Most of them were "neutral" scenes but a few showing violent or sexually provocative scenes were also included.

"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," researcher David Zald told New Scientist magazine.

"We think there is essentially a bottleneck for information processing and if a certain type of stimulus captures attention, it can jam up the bottleneck so subsequent information can't get through."

This appeared to happen involuntarily, Mr Zald said.

[ Emotion makes you blind. That might explain road rage... ]