New research has found our brains process pictures of women and men differently.

We're more likely to hone in on particular body parts, such as breasts and waists, when looking at images of women, while we see men as a whole, according to research published in the European Journal of Social Psychology.

"Everyday, ordinary women are being reduced to their sexual body parts," said study author Sarah Gervais, a psychologist at the University of Nebraska.

"This isn't just something that supermodels or porn stars have to deal with."

According to LiveScience, the researchers asked 227 undergraduate students to look at 48 photos of fully clothed men and women.

The participants were then shown two images side by side. One was the original and the other had an alteration to the chest or waist — known to be the most sexualised body parts. The participants had to pick which image they'd been shown earlier.

The researchers found people viewing the female images were better at matching individual body parts to the originals than they were at matching whole-body photographs.

But when they were viewing the male images, they were better at spotting the man as a whole, as opposed to individual body parts.

"It's both men and women doing this to women," Gervais said. "So don't blame the men here."

In the study, the researchers were investigating "global" and "local" mental processing. The brain uses global processing to identify objects as a whole, such as looking at a person's individual combination of nose, eyes and mouth in order to recognise the face.

Conversely, our brains use local processing to focus on individual elements of an object. This processing would be used if you recognised a house by its front door alone.

When images of women are sexually objectified, the researchers believe our brains are interpreting them in a local way, focusing on specific body parts, such as breasts.

In a second experiment, the researchers asked the participants to look at an image of a letter made up of tiny letters, such as a big H made up of small Ts.

Some of the participants were instructed to focus on the big letter to spark their brain's global processing. The others were asked to identify the tiny letters to engage their local processing.

When they looked at the original images again, the group who had focused on the big letter and engaged their global processing were more likely to look at a woman's body as a whole.

Gervais said the fact this simple letter exercise was able to change the participants' thought patterns suggests we can train our brains to respond differently.