A study has found that human brains actually process images differently depending on which gender people are looking at - regardless of whether they themselves are male or female, the Daily Mail reported.

The team behind the research has said it could help explain why women are often the subject of sexual objectification.

The research, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, found in a series of experiments that participants processed images of men and women in very different ways.

When casting our eyes upon an object, our brains either perceive it in its entirety or as a collection of its parts.

When presented with images of men, people tended to rely more on 'global' cognitive processing, the mental method in which a person is perceived as a whole.

Meanwhile, images of women were more often the subject of 'local' cognitive processing, or the objectifying perception of something as an assemblage of its various parts.

The team say the distinction is rather like the way we view pieces of a jigsaw compared to how we view the completes image.

The study is the first to link such cognitive processes to objectification theory, said Sarah Gervais, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the study's lead author.

"Local processing underlies the way we think about objects: houses, cars and so on," she said.


"But global processing should prevent us from that when it comes to people.

"We don't break people down to their parts – except when it comes to women, which is really striking. Women were perceived in the same ways that objects are viewed."

In the study, participants were randomly presented with dozens of images of fully clothed, average-looking men and women.

Each person was shown from head to knee, standing, with eyes focused on the camera.
After a brief pause, participants then saw two new images on their screen: One was unmodified and contained the original image, while the other was a slightly modified version of the original image that comprised a sexual body part.

Participants then quickly indicated which of the two images they had previously seen.


The results were consistent: Women's sexual body parts were more easily recognized when presented in isolation than when
they were presented in the context of their entire bodies.


But men's sexual body parts were recognized better when presented in the context of their entire bodies than they were in isolation.