We are a generation that has grown up processing an unprecedented amount of information. Significant parts of the information we process on a daily basis are images of people.  Advertisements of companies, regardless of their size and budgets, are often centered on a similar theme, being sex. The nature of the product being sold, varying from car tires to deodorants try to reach consumers by relating their product to sex.  These images are naturally perceived and experienced by potential consumers in distinctive ways.  In line with this process of perception, we are curious how men and women differentiate themselves from another when they are confronted with images that have sexual connotations.

Our hypothesis is the following: when confronted with seductive pictures of men and women, a man is primarily focused on the opposite sex while the women will focus on both sexes equally.Our research aims to test whether this is, or is not the case. Both EEG and a web camera will be used to detect the focus of participants.

Research has been done regarding the effects that seductive advertisements have on men and to lesser extent women. Also it is known that women and men do not have a uniform perception of sex and experience images in different ways. Our research wants to build on this, focusing on whether or not a woman gets as strongly stimulated while looking at a man, as a man does of a woman and vice versa. We also investigated whether a women gets as excited when focusing on another women as a man does of another man, and vice versa. As well, we looked at the amount of excitement, making use of EEG to measure where the excitement came from: images of faces, images of full body with clothes and full naked body images.

We will use pictures of faces, full bodies with clothes and without. We will use pictures of attractive people, as advertisements mostly make use of them to sell their product. Also,  it is easier to find pictures of attractive people to use for our research, because there is a great amount of pictures of attractive people available.

The final report of our group can be see here: research report Mu