Toward a theory of automatic information processing in reading

A model of information processing in reading is described in which visual information is transformed through a series of processing stages involving visual, phonological and episodic memory systems until it is finally comprehended in the semantic system. The processing which occurs at each stage is assumed to be learned and the degree of this learning is evaluated with respect to two criteria: accuracy and automaticity. At the accuracy level of performance, attention is assumed to be necessary for processing; at the automatic level it is not. Experimental procedures are described which attempt to measure the degree of automaticity achieved in perceptual and associative learning tasks. Factors which may influence the development of automaticity in reading are discussed.     

Effects of mood states on information processing strategies: Two studies of automatic and controlled processing using misattribution paradigms

To test the hypothesis that a positive mood facilitates automatic processing and a negative mood facilitates controlled processing, two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, after positive or negative mood was induced, participants rated the attractiveness of products while listening to a music tape that they were told would have the effect of inducing a positive, negative, or neutral mood. As predicted, augmentation effects were clearer in the negative mood condition than in the positive mood condition. In Experiment 2, participants were first presented with lists of names of non-famous Japanese companies either once or four times. One or two days later, they were presented with these names again, together with new names, and were asked to judge whether those names were famous or-non-famous. As predicted, subjects in a positive mood showed more false fame judgments than those in a negative mood because those in a positive mood did not control their feeling of familiarity correctly. These results indicated that those in positive moods are more likely to engage in automatic processing.     

Dissociating controlled from automatic processing in temporal preparation

The aim of the present study was to investigate the controlled versus the automatic nature of temporal preparation. If temporal preparation involves controlled rather than automatic processing, it should be reduced by the addition of a concurrent demanding task. This hypothesis was tested by comparing participants' performance in a temporal preparation task that measured two main effects of temporal preparation (temporal orienting and sequential effects) between a single-task and a dual-task condition. In the single-task condition, participants responded to a visual target presented after symbolic cues that were highly predictive of the moment of target onset. In the dual-task condition, the temporal preparation task was performed concurrently with a working memory task. The results showed that sequential effects survived to dual-task interference, while temporal orienting was reduced as a function of the competition for executive resources required by both working memory and temporal preparation tasks. These findings provide direct behavioural evidence that temporal orienting and sequential effects involve dissociable cognitive processes.     

An examination of automatic vs. controlled information processing in the employment interview: The case of minority applicants

Sex Roles - Based on the automatic vs. controlled attention argument, this paper tested the contention that the amount of job-relevant information given to decision makers prior to the employment...     

Controlled information processing resources and the development of automatic detection responses in schizophrenia

The relation between resource limitations and the type of processing (automatic vs. controlled) on a multiple-frame search task (MFST) was examined in 15 schizophrenic and 15 normal control subjects. After 320 trials of consistently mapped practice, the patients' detection accuracy was normalized, and the effect of processing load (letter array size) on their detection accuracy was eliminated, which suggests automatization. Changes in load effects with practice could not be used as an index of automatization in control subjects, because of their unexpected lack of load effects at the beginning of practice. In a dual-task (MFST during auditory shadowing) condition after MFST practice, patients' MFST accuracy deteriorated nonsignificantly, and patients' shadowing declined significantly. The findings suggest schizophrenics have reduced available processing resources, but research is needed to determine whether this is due to abnormal automatization.     

Neural mechanisms of the automatic processing of emotional information from faces and voices

Theoretical accounts suggest an increased and automatic neural processing of emotional, especially threat-related, facial expressions and emotional prosody. In line with this assumption, several functional imaging studies showed activation to threat-related faces and voices in subcortical and cortical brain areas during attentional distraction or unconscious stimulus processing. Furthermore, electrophysiological studies provided evidence for automatic early brain responses to emotional facial expressions and emotional prosody. However, there is increasing evidence that available cognitive resources modulate brain responses to emotional signals from faces and voices, even though conflicting findings may occur depending on contextual factors, specific emotions, sensory modality, and neuroscientific methods used. The current review summarizes these findings and suggests that further studies should combine information from different sensory modalities and neuroscientific methods such as functional neuroimaging and electrophysiology. Furthermore, it is concluded that the variable saliency and relevance of emotional social signals on the one hand and available cognitive resources on the other hand interact in a dynamic manner, making absolute boundaries of the automatic processing of emotional information from faces and voices unlikely.     

Response preparation in Parkinson's disease: automatic vs. controlled processing

Using a finger cuing paradigm, we investigated response preparation in Parkinson's disease (PD). The central question was whether PD individuals are differentially affected by preparatory cues that specify a more automatic response set configuration (that induces within-hand preparation) as opposed to a more controlled one (that induces between-hands preparation). Reaction times (RTs) and error rates were measured in 20 non-demented individuals with PD and 20 healthy control participants with a long and short preparation interval (500 ms and 2000 ms). RT benefits and/or costs were measured for cues indicating a within- and between-hands motor preparatory set. Overall, RTs were significantly longer, and errors more frequent, for PD participants than for control participants. More importantly, in comparison with control subjects, PD individuals showed a significant deficit in between-hands preparation but not in within-hand preparation. Furthermore, longer preparation intervals slowed down cued RTs of the control participants, but not those of the PD individuals. Together, these findings suggest that whereas automatic response preparation processes are spared in PD, controlled response preparation processes operate at a slower rate and/or are delayed in time.     

Differences in automatic social information processing between nondepressed and subclinically depressed individuals

The present research examined individual differences in automatic social information processing. We hypothesized that because nondepressed and subclinically depressed persons have different interpersonal experiences, they may process social information in different ways. In this experiment, participants were asked to make judgments about social relationships after being reminded of a target person. They had to make these judgments under either a light or a heavy memory load. Results showed that when nondepressed participants were reminded of people with whom they had frequent pleasant interactions, they made a greater number of positive judgments about their social relationships than did subclinically depressed participants. When subclinically depressed participants were reminded of people with whom they had had frequent unpleasant interactions, they made a greater number of negative judgments about their social relationships than did their nondepressed counterparts. Moreover, performance in these experimental conditions was unaffected by memory load, suggesting that automatic thoughts about their social relationships had been evoked.     

Moral judgments and the role of social harm: Differences in automatic versus controlled processing

The social intuitionist model has served as an important corrective to the earlier dominance of rational deliberation in moral psychology. Yet the relationship between intuition and deliberation in moral judgments remains largely unexplored. Three studies were conducted to explore the role of automatic and controlled processes in moral judgments. Results suggest that controlled processing is attuned to instances of social harm. Immoral acts (i.e., cases of serious academic dishonesty) that involved diffuse harm in the form of flouting societal rules did not result in increased moral censure under deliberation. In contrast, similar dishonest acts that involved direct social harm to others resulted in harsher, more punitive moral judgments under deliberation, providing evidence of augmentation of automatic responses under controlled processing. The results suggest that the intuitionist sensitivity to direct physical harm has parallels in the controlled processing system, which seems sensitive to non-physical instances of social harm, such as over-benefiting the self at the expense of deserving others.     

Feedback specificity,information processing,and transfer of training

This study examines the effects of feedback specificity on transfer of training and the mechanisms through which feedback can enhance or inhibit transfer. We used concurrent verbal protocol methodology to elicit and operationalize the explicit information processing activities used by 48 trainees performing the Furniture Factory computer simulation. We hypothesized and found support for a moderated mediation model. Increasing feedback specificity influenced the exposure trainees had to different task conditions and negatively affected their levels of explicit information processing. In turn, explicit information processes and levels of exposure to different task conditions interacted to impact transfer of training. Those who received less specific feedback relied more heavily on explicit information processing and had more exposure to the challenging aspects of the task than those who received more specific feedback, which differentially affected what they learned about the task. We discuss how feedback specificity and exposure to different task conditions may prime different learning processes.     

Serial position curves in rats: automatic versus effortful information processing

Rats were trained to remember lists of five arms on an Olton eight-arm radial maze. A forced-choice memory recognition test procedure was used which required the animal to choose between an arm previously visited during the study phase of a trial and an arm not visited. To receive additional food reinforcement, 10 animals were required to return to the previously visited arm (win-stay) and 10 animals were required to choose the novel, unvisited arm (win-shift). In this way, a direct comparison was made between the serial position curves (SPCs) generated by win-stay trained and win-shift trained animals. The results indicated that only win-stay trained animals produced the classical U-shaped SPC, which included significant primacy and recency effects. Win-shift subjects showed only recency effects. These findings are discussed in terms of differential processing requirements for the two procedures. It is suggested that the win-stay rule necessitates relatively more effortful, elaborative processing than does the win-shift rule, which is used automatically.     

Alexithymia and the automatic processing of affective information: Evidence from the affective priming paradigm

In Study 1, we examined the moderating impact of alexithymia (i.e., a difficulty identifying and describing feelings to other people and an externally oriented cognitive style) on the automatic processing of affective information. The affective priming paradigm was used, and lower priming effects for high alexithymia scorers were observed when congruent (incongruent) pairs involving nonverbal primes (angry face) and verbal target were presented. The results held after controlling for participants' negative affectivity. The same effects were replicated in Studies 2 and 3, with trait anxiety and depression entered as additional covariates. In Study 3, no moderating impact of alexithymia was found for verbal-facial pairs suggesting that the results cannot be merely explained in terms of transcoding limitations for high alexithymia scorers. Overall, the present results suggest that alexithymia could be related to a difficulty in processing and automatically using high arousal emotional information to respond to concomittant behavioural demands.     

Parkinson’s disease disrupts both automatic and controlled processing of action verbs

The problem of how word meaning is processed in the brain has been a topic of intense investigation in cognitive neuroscience. While considerable correlational evidence exists for the involvement of sensory-motor systems in conceptual processing, it is still unclear whether they play a causal role. We investigated this issue by comparing the performance of patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) with that of age-matched controls when processing action and abstract verbs. To examine the effects of task demands, we used tasks in which semantic demands were either implicit (lexical decision and priming) or explicit (semantic similarity judgment). In both tasks, PD patients’ performance was selectively impaired for action verbs (relative to controls), indicating that the motor system plays a more central role in the processing of action verbs than in the processing of abstract verbs. These results argue for a causal role of sensory-motor systems in semantic processing.     

Controlled & automatic processing: behavior,theory, and biological mechanisms

This paper provides an overview of developments in a dual processing theory of automatic and controlled processing that began with the empirical and theoretical work described by Schneider and Shiffrin (1977) and Shiffrin and Schneider (1977) over a quarter century ago. A review of relevant empirical findings suggests that there is a set of core behavioral phenomena reflecting differences between controlled and automatic processing that must be addressed by a successful theory. These phenomena relate to: consistency in training, serial versus parallel processing, level of effort, robustness to stressors, degree of control, effects on long‐term memory, and priority encoding. We detail a computational model of controlled processing, CAP2, that accounts for these phenomena as emergent properties of an underlying hybrid computational architecture. The model employs a large network of distributed data modules that can categorize, buffer, associate, and prioritize information. Each module is a connectionist network with input and output layers, and each module communicates with a central Control System by outputting priority and activity report signals, and by receiving control signals. The Control System is composed of five processors including a Goal Processor, an Attention Controller, an Activity Monitor, an Episodic Store, and a Gating & Report Relay. The transition from controlled to automatic processing occurs in this model as the data modules become capable of transmitting their output without mediation by the Control System. We describe recent progress in mapping the components of this model onto specific neuroanatomical substrates, briefly discuss the potential for applying functional neuroimaging techniques to test the model's predictions, and its relation to other models.     

Intentional and automatic processing of numerical information in mathematical anxiety: testing the influence of emotional priming

ABSTRACT

Current theoretical approaches suggest that mathematical anxiety (MA) manifests itself as a weakness in quantity manipulations. This study is the first to examine automatic versus intentional processing of numerical information using the numerical Stroop paradigm in participants with high MA. To manipulate anxiety levels, we combined the numerical Stroop task with an affective priming paradigm. We took a group of college students with high MA and compared their performance to a group of participants with low MA. Under low anxiety conditions (neutral priming), participants with high MA showed relatively intact number processing abilities. However, under high anxiety conditions (mathematical priming), participants with high MA showed (1) higher processing of the non-numerical irrelevant information, which aligns with the theoretical view regarding deficits in selective attention in anxiety and (2) an abnormal numerical distance effect. These results demonstrate that abnormal, basic numerical processing in MA is context related.     

Root versus roof: automatic activation of location information during word processing

In four experiments, participants were presented with nouns referring to entities that are associated with an up or down location (e.g., roof, root). The required response either was compatible with the referent location or was not (e.g., upward vs. downward movement after reading roof). Across experiments, we manipulated whether the experimental task required word reading or not, as well as whether the response involved a movement or was stationary. In all experiments, participants’ responses were significantly faster in the compatible than in the incompatible condition. This strongly suggests that location information is automatically activated when nouns are being processed.     

The interplay of controlled and automatic processing in the expression of spontaneously inferred traits: A PDP analysis

Inferences made about actors influence subsequent processing about those actors. Three experiments conducted in the context of spontaneous trait inference (STI) making demonstrate that such influences occur can either occur via automatic processes or via controlled processes. Results from Experiment 1 demonstrated that processing goals manipulated prior to encoding actor behavior affected the extent to which STIs automatically influenced subsequent responses but did not alter the extent to which STIs influenced those responses via controlled processes. Results from Experiment 2 showed that the extent to which STIs affected subsequent responding via the action of controlled processes were more affected by a delay between exposure to an actor behavior and the response task than the extent to which STIs affected task performance via the action of automatic processes. Finally, results from Experiment 3 showed that participants' subjective experience of awareness of their trait inferences is related to estimates of the extent to which controlled processing is involved in the production of their future responses but not to estimates of the extent to which those responses are affected by automatic processing.