Even though porn might be fun to watch for some people, that doesn’t mean that they remembered what they watched. The reason for this is this popular internet pastime affects short-term memory negatively. Yet there’s a downside to this activity: one can end up making disadvantageous decisions such as missing appointments or not sleeping, and which can result in what researchers termed as ‘negative life consequences’.
The study which was conducted by Christian Laier, a colleague and his professor at the University of Duisberg-Essen, asked 28 heterosexual males, approximately at th age of 26, to look at a series of images on a computer. One half of the images were pornographic while the other half consisted on pictures that were non-sexual in nature such as people playing sports, laughing in a group or even carrying a weapon.
The study also consisted of a test where the group of men were required to hit a key and which indicated ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as to whether the image they had seen was the same one displayed four slides earlier – a test that was used to engage their ‘working memory’. While they were accurate 80 percent of the time when it came to non-pornographic images, the accuracy dropped to 67 percent when it came to pornographic images. But that’s not all – when the images aroused them sexually, the accuracy dropped even further. By this, it was clear that pornography does affect working memory, and in turn, affects decisions related to completing everyday tasks. However, researchers also said that further study would be required to see if this was true for gay men and lesbians.