A new study from the University of Exeter suggests that a brief, non-invasive brain stimulation session can alter the way people visually process images of sexualised women. In a double-blind experiment, participants who received stimulation to the forehead recognised upright photographs of women in underwear more accurately than those who received a placebo.
Experts say the findings offer initial evidence that the visual biases associated with sexual objectification are malleable and may be shifted by directly influencing perception. The work is published in Social Neuroscience and was led by Ciro Civile and Arwen Stephens of Exeter.
Sexual objectification describes seeing a person, typically a woman, mainly as a physical body or collection of sexual parts rather than as a full human being. Researchers have long noted links between objectification and differences in how the visual system processes faces and bodies, particularly regarding whether people rely on holistic, configural processing or on attention to individual features.
The study builds on prior ideas that objectification operates partly as a perceptual habit. In the lab, researchers test configural processing using the inversion paradigm: when a photo is upside down, recognition of faces or bodies becomes harder, a drop known as the inversion effect. In contrast, inanimate objects are less affected by inversion because features can be identified from any orientation.
Lead author Civile explained that objectification is widespread in media and can be linked to real harms. “We know a lot about those consequences, but much less about the mental machinery behind objectification.”
To probe whether visual recognition biases could be shifted directly, the team used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a non-invasive method that delivers a weak current through scalp electrodes to modulate how readily brain cells fire. Past work in Exeter showed differential effects of forehead stimulation on upright recognition for distorted faces; the researchers hypothesised that sexualised images of women might disrupt whole-body processing in a similar way and that stimulation could restore more typical recognition patterns.
The study recruited 76 right‑handed university students (54 women, 22 men) with an average age of about 22. They were randomly assigned to active stimulation or placebo in a double-blind procedure. The stimulation used a 1.5‑milliampere current, ramping up for five seconds, continuing for 10 minutes, then ramping down for five seconds. In the placebo condition, the current ramped up and down at the start but lasted only 30 seconds to mimic the tingling sensation without providing meaningful stimulation.
Participants wore saline-soaked sponge electrodes on the forehead and above the eyebrow positions to target the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, though the researchers emphasise that the current spreads beyond a single brain region and is described by pad placement rather than a precise anatomical target.
The recognition task involved 64 colour photographs of white models in black underwear, presented both upright and inverted during a study phase, followed by a test phase where half of the images were mixed with new ones. Participants had up to three seconds to indicate whether they had seen a model before.
Overall recognition accuracy did not differ significantly between the active and placebo groups. However, the placebo group displayed a pronounced inversion effect: recognition accuracy dropped more for upright-to-upside-down images of male models (0.69) than for female models (0.27).
In the active stimulation group, the gap between male and female inversion effects narrowed in a statistically meaningful way. The inversion effect for female models rose to 0.87, while the male inversion effect remained similar to placebo at about 0.75. A follow-up Bayesian test indicated the active data were roughly six times more consistent with the absence of an objectification bias than with the bias observed in prior work, though the authors caution that this does not prove the two effects are identical.
Further analysis showed that the larger inversion effect for women under active stimulation was driven by higher recognition of upright female photos (74% correct) compared with the placebo group (67%), with fewer false alarms. There was no significant group difference for upside-down female images, and the male inversion effect did not differ notably between groups.
As Civile put it: “The way we see sexualised images of women isn’t hard-wired. In our study, ten minutes of a weak current to the forehead made people better at recognizing sexualised women in right-way-up photos. They then recognised the women the way they recognised the men, which is the way we normally recognise people rather than objects.”
He added that the findings align with other work showing that power dynamics and humanising information can shift objectifying tendencies, suggesting objectification is at least partly a perceptual habit capable of being changed. “What nobody had tested was whether it could be changed by acting directly on perception.”
The researchers acknowledge several caveats. The experiment used photographs of models in underwear rather than fully clothed comparisons, so image differences could contribute to the observed gaps. The inversion effect is an indirect measure of objectifying attitudes, not a direct readout of real-world behaviour, and the sample consisted of healthy young adults, excluding those with psychiatric or neurological conditions.
The team also notes that the longer active stimulation was not matched by a longer placebo experience, and they did not explicitly record participants’ sensations or guesses about group assignment. They emphasise that the results reflect a single-session effect in a lab setting, not a lasting remedy for sexism.
“The practical significance is about understanding, not treatment,” Civile said. “The effects of a single session of this kind of stimulation are thought to last up to a couple of hours. What matters is the proof of principle: a perceptual bias tied to objectification can be shifted by acting directly on perception.”
The study is titled “Disrupting objectification: transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) enhances the inversion effect toward sexualized women” and was authored by Ciro Civile and Arwen Stephens.
