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Sex discriminations made on the basis of ambiguous visual cues can be affected by the presence of an olfactory cue

BACKGROUND: Almost every interpersonal interaction is mediated by the sex of the individuals involved. Visual, auditory, and olfactory cues provide individuals with the opportunity to discriminate the sex of others from a distance and so prepare sex-appropriate behaviours for any impending interacti...

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Autores principales: Hacker, Graeme, Brooks, Anna, van der Zwan, Rick
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2013
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270023/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25566362
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/2050-7283-1-10
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author Hacker, Graeme
Brooks, Anna
van der Zwan, Rick
author_facet Hacker, Graeme
Brooks, Anna
van der Zwan, Rick
author_sort Hacker, Graeme
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Almost every interpersonal interaction is mediated by the sex of the individuals involved. Visual, auditory, and olfactory cues provide individuals with the opportunity to discriminate the sex of others from a distance and so prepare sex-appropriate behaviours for any impending interaction. The usefulness of that important social skill is mediated by the reliability of the sensory information. Sometimes cues in one domain will be ambiguous, and the perceptual processes mediating sex perceptions will need to integrate information from across the senses for better reliability. With that in mind, the experiment reported here was designed to explore the effect of olfactory-visual interactions on sex perceptions. METHODS: Observers were presented visually with point-light walkers that were sexually ambiguous (not unequivocally female or male). They were asked to judge, using a two-alternative forced choice paradigm, the sex of each walker. Tested on two occasions, observers unknowingly made sex judgements in the presence or absence of pads soaked in male sweat. RESULTS: The presence of male sweat was associated with higher proportions of ‘male’ judgements of both ambiguous female and ambiguous male walkers (F(1,19) = 24.11, p < 0.01). CONCLUSION: These findings suggest that olfactory cues can modulate visual sex discriminations made on the basis of biological motion cues. Importantly, they seem to do so even when the olfactory cue is not consciously perceived, suggesting these effects are mediated by perceptual rather than cognitive processes. These findings suggest that there exist cortical processes mediating sex perceptions that are capable of integrating visual and olfactory information. What is important is that this sensory integration takes place without conscious knowledge and that appropriate behaviour modifications may occur automatically.
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spelling pubmed-42700232015-01-06 Sex discriminations made on the basis of ambiguous visual cues can be affected by the presence of an olfactory cue Hacker, Graeme Brooks, Anna van der Zwan, Rick BMC Psychol Research Article BACKGROUND: Almost every interpersonal interaction is mediated by the sex of the individuals involved. Visual, auditory, and olfactory cues provide individuals with the opportunity to discriminate the sex of others from a distance and so prepare sex-appropriate behaviours for any impending interaction. The usefulness of that important social skill is mediated by the reliability of the sensory information. Sometimes cues in one domain will be ambiguous, and the perceptual processes mediating sex perceptions will need to integrate information from across the senses for better reliability. With that in mind, the experiment reported here was designed to explore the effect of olfactory-visual interactions on sex perceptions. METHODS: Observers were presented visually with point-light walkers that were sexually ambiguous (not unequivocally female or male). They were asked to judge, using a two-alternative forced choice paradigm, the sex of each walker. Tested on two occasions, observers unknowingly made sex judgements in the presence or absence of pads soaked in male sweat. RESULTS: The presence of male sweat was associated with higher proportions of ‘male’ judgements of both ambiguous female and ambiguous male walkers (F(1,19) = 24.11, p < 0.01). CONCLUSION: These findings suggest that olfactory cues can modulate visual sex discriminations made on the basis of biological motion cues. Importantly, they seem to do so even when the olfactory cue is not consciously perceived, suggesting these effects are mediated by perceptual rather than cognitive processes. These findings suggest that there exist cortical processes mediating sex perceptions that are capable of integrating visual and olfactory information. What is important is that this sensory integration takes place without conscious knowledge and that appropriate behaviour modifications may occur automatically. BioMed Central 2013-06-19 /pmc/articles/PMC4270023/ /pubmed/25566362 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/2050-7283-1-10 Text en © Hacker et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013 This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Hacker, Graeme
Brooks, Anna
van der Zwan, Rick
Sex discriminations made on the basis of ambiguous visual cues can be affected by the presence of an olfactory cue
title Sex discriminations made on the basis of ambiguous visual cues can be affected by the presence of an olfactory cue
title_full Sex discriminations made on the basis of ambiguous visual cues can be affected by the presence of an olfactory cue
title_fullStr Sex discriminations made on the basis of ambiguous visual cues can be affected by the presence of an olfactory cue
title_full_unstemmed Sex discriminations made on the basis of ambiguous visual cues can be affected by the presence of an olfactory cue
title_short Sex discriminations made on the basis of ambiguous visual cues can be affected by the presence of an olfactory cue
title_sort sex discriminations made on the basis of ambiguous visual cues can be affected by the presence of an olfactory cue
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270023/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25566362
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/2050-7283-1-10
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