Princeton professor targets girly pics

Susan Fiske, professor of psychology at Princeton University, has joined the highest academic ranks of the 'school of the bleeding obvious' with her finding that men are more likely to think of women as objects if they have just been looking at pictures of girls in bikinis.

A team of researchers used brain scans to show that when looking at such pictures, the part of the brain that normally 'lights up' in men in anticipation of using DIY power tools - the premotor cortex - was activated. "It's as if they immediately thought to act on theses bodies," Fiske told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.

Fiske said her findings confirmed the long-held suspicion that a profusion of sexy or pornographic images of women have an effect on how women are perceived at work. "When there are sexualised images in the workplace, it's hard for people not to think about their female colleagues in those terms," she said.

According to the Guardian, Fiske put straight men into an MRI brain scanner and showed them pictures of either clothed men and women, or more scantily clad men and women. "When they took a memory test afterwards, the men best remembered images of bikini-clad women whose heads had been digitally removed." ·