Identifying deviant sexual interest in a sex offender sample using dual-target rapid serial visual presentation task |
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| Authors: | Angelo Zappalà Jan Antfolk Beate Dombert Andreas Mokros Pekka Santtila |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Department of Psychology and Logopedics, ?bo Akademi University, Turku, Finland;2. CRIMELAB, IUSTO – Pontifical Salesian University, Turin, Italyangelo.zappala@abo.fi;4. Department of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, School of Medicine, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany;5. Department for Forensic Psychiatry, University Hospital of Psychiatry, Zurich, Switzerland;6. Department of Forensic Psychiatry, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany |
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| Abstract: | To investigate the dual-target rapid serial visual presentation (dtRSVP) task as a measure of deviant sexual interest (i.e. a sexual interest in children), we administered a dtRSVP with gender- and age-specific pictorial stimuli to child sex offenders (n = 69), other sex offenders (n = 43), non-sex offenders (n = 14), and community controls (n = 88). We hypothesized that (1) stimuli belonging to the preferred gender and age group presented as targets (both T1 and the subsequent T2) in the serial sequence would be more accurately detected than non-preferred stimuli and that (2) this increased detection would reduce the detection of targets later in the serial sequence (T2) due to an attentional blink. Our findings supported hypothesis 1 and partly supported hypothesis 2. Although we found group differences, individual indices based on detection rates did not allow for individual-level diagnostic categorization of participants. |
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| Keywords: | Deviant sexual interest pedophilia Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) attentional blink (AB) pop out attention-based measures |
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