From Inversion Effects to Objectification: A Methodological Reappraisal of Bernard et al.

Bernard et al. (2019) reported that suggestive postures, but not revealing clothing, attenuated the N170 body-inversion effect, interpreting this as evidence that posture causes cognitive objectification. This commentary reappraises all three EEG experiments, both published supplements, statistical inferences, and subsequent research on body-inversion measures. The posture-by-orientation interactions are credible within the tested photographs and persist when a summary index of bodily asymmetry is matched. Evidence against the prediction that revealing clothing abolishes the inversion effect is also stronger than a nonsignificant interaction alone: swimwear images retained a clear inversion effect, while pooled data constrain large average clothing interactions. However, the suggestive and nonsuggestive poses differed in multiple perceptual features, the manipulation strengths were unequal, and only a few stimulus identities were sampled. Crucially, attenuation of the N170 inversion effect has not been validated as a specific index of objectification in the broader social-psychological sense. Secondary hemisphere interactions and latency effects further qualify a binary person-like/object-like interpretation. The experiments establish pose-dependent modulation of early visual processing under restricted conditions. They do not establish that the sexual suggestiveness of the postures, rather than correlated perceptual characteristics, accounts for the observed neural effects, nor do they independently validate those effects as indicators of cognitive objectification.