They say love is blind. Now it seems that the same is true for lust. Erotic images stop us registering things we see immediately afterwards.
The effect, which also occurs with violent images, will fuel calls by road-safety campaigners to ban sexy billboard adverts near busy roads because they could distract drivers.
David Zald from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and colleagues flashed sequences of 100-millisecond images in front of male volunteers. They asked the men to say in which direction a particular picture in the sequence had been rotated. Most images were of landscapes or buildings, but the psychologists…
