Sheng He, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota, and his colleagues conducted a study using subliminal images. They recruited volunteers from different sexual orientations and gathered together 10 members of each of the following groups: Heterosexual men, heterosexual women, homosexual men and homosexual women. Each group then viewed specially constructed images that were pointed directly at the left and right eye separately.
They used an image called a Gabor patch, named after the mathematician who created it to test our ability to determine spatial frequency and visual space. Sheng He explained that normally your two eyes look at the same image and therefore dont have any conflict, but by using a Gabor Patch he could create a situation where the two eyes were looking at two different images. Now, when one eye is presented with an image that has high contrast and the other is static we will only see and be aware of the dynamic image. The other image goes undetected.
Using a high contrast image, presented to only one eye, the researchers could therefore cancel out the image that was being seen by the other eye. The volunteer would only be...