Facing the Naked Attraction: Unconscious Attention Priming towards Naked Human Bodies Suppressed by Backwards Visual Masking

<p>After two attempts of replicating Jiang et al. (2006) with continuous flash suppression (Chen et al., 2026a) and gaze-contingent crowding (Chen et al., 2026b), we found evidence for attraction towards suppressed opposite-sex nude images in heterosexual individuals below the subjective, instead of the objective threshold of consciousness, as claimed by Jiang et al. The contrast between previous studies suggests that the attention effect we seek might depend on how suppression is established. Switching to a more direct visual suppression approach, the present study used backwards visual masking across four experiments. Experiment 1 found evidence for attraction towards sexually preferred images below the objective conscious threshold in heterosexual participants, as well as evidence for sex-specific selection in the observed effect. Experiment 3 obscured the faces of the nude stimuli and returned strong evidence in heterosexual females that body-feature information alone is sufficient to drive the effect. Experiments 2 and 4 served as standalone subliminality controls, confirming that perception remained below the objective threshold with and without the attention task. Read against previous findings (Chen et al., 2026a, b), the current results indicate that the unconscious attention effect generalises across distinct routes to invisibility and is content-selective at the level of body features, rather than solely relying on low-level image properties.</p>