Sexual Incentives
Under natural circumstances, most animals
respond sexually to a select set of stimuli, and such
stimuli mainly tend to convey fertility status. In
humans the situation is quite different. The stimuli
that trigger sexual wanting can vary extensively
among individuals, groups of individuals, space and
time, to the extent that what excites one individual
repels another. This obviously imposes a challenge for
investigators who are interested in presenting sexual
stimuli in an experimental context. One common solution is to use validated stimuli, i.e., stimuli that trigger
sexual wanting averaged over a group of subjects.
The drawback is that subjects are rarely presented
with their personal favored sexual incentives.
All our senses are capable of detecting sexual
incentives, and this allows both distant (typically auditory, olfactory or visual) and proximal (typically somatosensory) incentives to be detected. Even in the
absence of sensory stimulation, our imagination provides a highly important—though extremely understudied—source of sexual incentives. In the realm of
human brain research, most effort has been put into
investigating how the brain deals with visual sexual
stimulation (VSS). This is not surprising: Vision is the
dominant sensory modality for most humans, and visual paradigms are generally compatible with popular
human brain research techniques such as EEG or
fMRI.