Heterosexual men and women differ in their sensitivity to cues indicating material status. This dissociation has been explained by appealing to sexual selection processes that encourage women to evaluate men on the basis of their material status but could perhaps be explained by sex differences in contextual attention, or, associative representations.
In Experiment 1, heterosexual women rated the attractiveness of an opposite sex model in 4 conditions; (1) attractive context, (2) attractive context with implied ownership, (3) unattractive context, and (4) unattractive context with ownership implied. A second experiment used a fictitious stockbroker learning task (with both men and women) in 2 biconditional discriminations to measure contextual attention (stage 1) and then to explore the structure of contextual representation (stage 2) using a transfer of occasion setting test.
In Experiment 1, females increased ratings in attractive contexts, both when context ownership was implied and when it was not. In the first stage of Experiment 2, men and women were equally sensitive to contextual cues. In stage 2, women’s learning was impaired when a stimulus previously used as a target was employed as a context (they showed transfer of occasions setting), men showed no such difference.
Sex differences in sensitivity to cues indicating material status may reflect how men and women tend to encode the relationships between background/context stimuli and target stimuli. Women automatically attend to the background and modulate the value of targets using a hierarchical form of representation, whilst men represent background-target associations configurally.
Aharon, I., Etcoff, N., Ariely, D., Chabris, C. F., O’Connor, E., & Breiter, H. C. (2001). Beautiful faces have variable reward value: fMRI and behavioural evidence. Neuron, 32, 537–551.
Baillargeon, R. (1987). Young infants’ reasoning about the physical and spatial properties of hidden object. Cognitive Development, 2, 179–200.
Bayliss, A., Pellegrino, G., & Tipper, S. (2005). Sex differences in eye gaze and symbolic cueing of attention. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58, 1–17.
Bonardi, C., Bartle, C., & Jennings, D. (2012). US specificity of occasion setting: Hierarchical or configural learning. Behavioural Processes, 90, 311–322.
Buss, D. M. (1989). Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses testing in 37 cultures. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 12, 1–49.
Buss, D., & Schmitt, D. (1993). Sexual strategies theory: An evolutionary perspective on human mating. Psychological Review, 100, 204–232.
Cahill, S. E. (1983). Reexamining the acquisition of sex roles: A social interactionist approach. Sex Roles, 9, 1–15.
Collins D. W., & Kimura, D. (1997). A large sex difference on a two-dimensional mental rotation task. Behavioural Neuroscience, 111, 845–849.
Dunn, M. J., & Hill, A. (2014). Manipulated luxury-apartment ownership enhances opposite-sex attraction in females but not males. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 12, 1–17.
Dunn, M., & Searle, R. (2010). Effect of manipulated prestige-car ownership. British Journal of Psychology, 101, 69–80.
Furnham, A., Swami, V., & Shah, K. (2006). Body weight, waist-to-hip ratio and breast size correlates of ratings of attractiveness and health. Personality and Individual Differences, 41, 443–454.
George, D. N., & Pearce, J. M. (2012). A configural theory of attention and associative learning. Learning and Behavior, 40, 241–254.
Giambra, L. M., & Quilter, R. (1988). Sustained attention in adulthood: A unique, large-sample, longitudinal and multicohort analysis using the Mackworth Clock-Test. Psychology and Aging, 3, 75–83.
Gibbins, R. (1969). Communications aspects of women’s clothes and their relationship to fashionability. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 8, 301–312.
Halpern, D. F. (2000). Sex differences in cognitive abilities (3rd Edition). Lawrence Erlbaum, Associates, Inc. Publishers, Mahwah, NJ.
Hassebrauk, M. (1998). The visual process method: A new method to study physical attractiveness. Evolution and Human Behavior, 19, 111–123.
Hill, E., Nocks, E., & Gardner, L. (1987). Manipulation by physical and status displays. Ethology and Sociobiology, 8, 43–154.
Holland, P. C. (1989). Acquisition and transfer of conditional discriminative performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 15, 154–165.
Honey, R. C., & Watt, A. (1998). Acquired relational equivalence: Implications for the nature of associative structures. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 24, 325–334.
Honey, R. C., & Watt, A. (1999). Acquired relational equivalence between contexts and features. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 25, 324–333.
Hoult, T. F. (1954). Experimental measurement of clothing as a factor in some social ratings of selected American men. American Sociological review, 19, 326–327.
Marritt, P, Hirshman, E., Wharton, W., Stangl, B., Devlin, J., & Lenz, A. (2007). Evidence for gender differences in visual selective attention. Personality and Individual Differences, 43, 597–609.
Pearce, J. M. (1987). A model of stimulus generalization for Pavlovian conditioning. Psychological Review, 94, 61–73.
Rheingold, H. L., & Cook, K. V. (1975). The content of boys’ and girls’ rooms as an index of parents’ behaviour. Child Development, 46, 459–463.
Townsend, J. M. (1989). Mate selection Criteria: A pilot study. Ethology and Sociobiology, 10, 241–253.
Tractinsky, N. Cokhavi, A. Kirschenbaum, M. (2004). Using ratings and response latencies to evaluate the consistency of immediate aesthetic perceptions of web pages. Proceedings of the Third Annual Workshop on HCI Research, Washington, D.C., December 10–11.
Trivers, R. L. (1972) Parental investment and sexual selection. In B. Campbell, (Ed) Sexual selection and the descent of man, 1871–1971, Aldine-Atherton, Chicago, pp. 136–179.
Watt, A., & Honey, R. C. (1997). Combining CSs associated with the same or different USs. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 50B, 350–367.
Yarmey, A. D. (1986). Verbal, visual, and voice identification of a rape suspect under different levels of illumination. Journal of Applied Psychology, 71, 363–370.
Yarmey, A. D. (2004). Eyewitness recall and photo identification: A field experiment. Psychology, Crime & Law, 10, 53–68.
Yonker, J. E., Eriksson, E., Nilsson, L.-G., & Herlitz, A. (2003) Sex differences in episodic memory: the minimal influence of estradiol. Brain and Cognition, 52, 231–238.