The nonconscious road to perceptions of performance: Achievement priming augments outcome expectancies and experienced self-agency

Three experiments explored the effects of priming the achievement concept on the expectation of performance outcomes and experiences of self-agency over outcomes in a task in which performance outcomes were dependent on chance. Experiment 1 and 2 showed that achievement priming produced expectations of higher (more successful) outcomes prior to working on the task, regardless of whether priming was subliminal (nonconscious) or supraliminal (conscious) and that this effect could not be attributed to subjective motivation to perform well. Experiment 3 revealed that subliminal achievement priming decreased participants’ experienced self-agency when outcome feedback was low, but increased self-agency when it was high. Together, these results suggest that activating achievement concepts outside of awareness spontaneously triggers expectations of higher task outcomes, which increases or decreases self-agency depending on whether there is a match or mismatch with observed outcomes. Implications for the literature on achievement-priming effects on behavior are discussed.     

Feeling of doing in obsessive–compulsive checking

Research on self-agency emphasizes the importance of a comparing mechanism, which scans for a match between anticipated and actual outcomes, in the subjective experience of doing.This study explored the “feeling of doing” in individuals with checking symptoms by examining the mechanism involved in the experienced agency for outcomes that matched expectations. This mechanism was explored using a task in which the subliminal priming of potential action-effects (emulating outcome anticipation) generally enhances people’s feeling of causing these effects when they occur, due to the unconscious perception of a match between primed and observed outcomes. The main result revealed a negative relationship between checking and self-agency for observed outcomes that were primed prior to actions. This suggests that checking individuals fail to grasp the correspondence between actual outcomes of their actions and expected ones. We discuss the possible role of undermined self-agency in checking phenomena and its relationship with cognitive dysfunction.     

On the foundations of beliefs in free will: intentional binding and unconscious priming in self-agency

The concept of an ability to make choices and to determine one's own outcomes fits well with experiences that most people have, and these experiences form the basis for beliefs in free will. However, the existence of conscious free will is challenged by modern research findings highlighting the unconscious origins of goal-directed behavior that gives rise to free-will beliefs. This report expands on these insights by revealing that both conscious and unconscious processes play an important role in free-will beliefs. Specifically, Experiment 1 demonstrates that free-will beliefs are strengthened when conscious intentions to produce action outcomes bind the perception of action and outcome together in time. Experiment 2 shows that these beliefs are strengthened when unconscious priming of action outcomes creates illusory experiences of self-agency when the primed outcomes occur. Together, these findings suggest that beliefs in free will are associated with self-agency and are enhanced by both conscious and unconscious information processing of goal-directed behavior.     

Prime and probability: causal knowledge affects inferential and predictive effects on self-agency experiences

Experiences of having caused a certain outcome may arise from motor predictions based on action–outcome probabilities and causal inferences based on pre-activated outcome representations. However, when and how both indicators combine to affect such self-agency experiences is still unclear. Based on previous research on prediction and inference effects on self-agency, we propose that their (combined) contribution crucially depends on whether people have knowledge about the causal relation between actions and outcomes that is relevant to subsequent self-agency experiences. Therefore, we manipulated causal knowledge that was either relevant or irrelevant by varying the probability of co-occurrence (50% or 80%) of specific actions and outcomes. Afterwards, we measured self-agency experiences in an action–outcome task where outcomes were primed or not. Results showed that motor prediction only affected self-agency when relevant actions and outcomes were learned to be causally related. Interestingly, however, inference effects also occurred when no relevant causal knowledge was acquired.     

Testing the speech unit hypothesis with the primed matching task: Phoneme categories are perceptually basic

The basic speech unit (phoneme or syllable) problem was investigatedwith the primed matching task. In primed matching, subjects have to decide whether the elements of stimulus pairs are the same or different. The prime should facilitate matching in as far as its representation is similar to the stimuli to be matched. If stimulus representations generate graded structure, with stimulus instances being more or less prototypical for the category, priming should interact with prototypicality because prototypical instances are more similar to the activated category than are low-prototypical instances. Rosch (1975a, 1975b) showed that, by varying the matching criterion (matching for physical identity or for belonging to the same category), the specific patterns of the priming × prototypicality interaction could differentiate perceptually based from abstract categories. Bytesting this pattern forphoneme and syllable categories, the abstraction level of these categories canbe studied. After finding reliable prototypicality effects for both phoneme and syllable categories (Experiments 1 and 2), primed phoneme matching (Experiments 3 and 4) and primed syllable matching (Experiments 5 and 6) were used under both physical identity instructions and same-category instructions. The results make clear that phoneme categories are represented on the basis of perceptual information, whereas syllable representations are more abstract. The phoneme category can thus be identified as the basic speech unit. Implications for phoneme and syllable representation are discussed.     

On the dynamics of action representations evoked by names of manipulable objects

Two classes of hand action representations are shown to be activated by listening to the name of a manipulable object (e.g., cellphone). The functional action associated with the proper use of an object is evoked soon after the onset of its name, as indicated by primed execution of that action. Priming is sustained throughout the duration of the word's enunciation. Volumetric actions (those used to simply lift an object) show a negative priming effect at the onset of a word, followed by a short-lived positive priming effect. This time-course pattern is explained by a dual-process mechanism involving frontal and parietal lobes for resolving conflict between candidate motor responses. Both types of action representations are proposed to be part of the conceptual knowledge recruited when the name of a manipulable object is encountered, although functional actions play a more central role in the representation of lexical concepts.     

Conceptual activation of distractors during selection is not sufficient to produce negative priming

Negative priming (NP) occurs when responses are slower because the targets were distractors on the preceding trial. Word-naming NP occurs only with words that have been presented repeatedly as targets; novel words do not show NP. The activation-inhibition explanation is that representations of repeated-word distractors are activated already and must be inhibited; the inhibition carries over to the next trial. If this explanation is correct, novel-word NP should occur if the word is semantically primed (thus activating its representation) before it occurs as a distractor. In two experiments, there was NP for words from a repeated set, and the magnitude of NP increased when the same word could occur as a target on consecutive trials. There was positive, rather than negative, priming for novel-word targets that had been semantically primed as distractors. Either the activation from semantic priming was not sufficiently strong to require inhibition, or the activation-inhibition hypothesis does not refer to activation of conceptual representations.     

Subliminal priming of actions influences sense of control over effects of action

The experience of controlling one’s own actions, and through them events in the outside world, is a pervasive feature of human mental life. Two experiments investigated the relation between this sense of control and the internal processes involved in action selection and cognitive control. Action selection was manipulated by subliminally priming left or right keypress actions in response to a supraliminal visual target. The action caused the display of one of several colours as an action effect. The specific colour shown depended on whether the participant’s action was compatible or incompatible with the preceding subliminal prime, and not on the prime identity alone. Unlike previous studies, therefore, the primes did not predict the to-be-expected action effects. Participants rated how much control they experienced over the different colours. Replicating previous results, compatible primes facilitated responding, whereas incompatible primes interfered with response selection. Crucially, priming also modulated the sense of control over action effects: participants experienced more control over colours produced by actions that were compatible with the preceding prime than over colours associated with prime-incompatible actions. Experiment 2 showed that this effect was not solely due to priming modulating action–effect contingencies. These results suggest that sense of control is linked to processes of selection between alternative actions, being strongest when selection is smooth and uncontested.     

Comparisons, mental models, and the action effect in judgments of regret

People tend to attribute more regret to a character who has decided to take action and experienced a negative outcome than to one who has decided not to act and experienced a negative outcome. For some decisions, however, this finding is not observed in a between-participants design and thus appears to rely on comparisons between people's representations of action and their representations of inaction. In this article, we outline a mental models account that explains findings from studies that have used within- and between-participants designs, and we suggest that, for decisions with uncertain counterfactual outcomes, information about the consequences of a decision to act causes people to flesh out their representation of the counterfactual states of affairs for inaction. In three experiments, we confirm our predictions about participants' fleshing out of representations, demonstrating that an action effect occurs only when information about the consequences of action is available to participants as they rate the nonactor and when this information about action is informative with respect to judgments about inaction. It is important to note that the action effect always occurs when the decision scenario specifies certain counterfactual outcomes. These results suggest that people sometimes base their attributions of regret on comparisons among different sets of mental models.     

Neural activity reveals effects of aging on inhibitory processes during word retrieval

Word retrieval difficulties are one of the most frustrating problems for older adults. Poorer access to phonological representation of the target word has been postulated as the underlying deficit, supported by findings of improved word retrieval after phonological priming. To better understand aging effects in the underlying neurophysiology associated with word retrieval, this study examined electrophysiological correlates of phonological priming and word retrieval in adults. Young, middle-aged, and older adults viewed pictures that were preceded by pseudo-word primes that either shared initial phonemes with or were unrelated to the picture’s name. Participants made phonological judgments regarding the prime and picture prior to naming the picture. Behavioral and event-related potential correlates of phonological priming and word retrieval were recorded. All groups benefitted similarly from phonological priming, evidenced by faster phonological judgment response times and increased ease of word retrieval for primed pictures, indexed by the N400 priming effect. The peak latency of the N2, however, showed an incremental delay with age. High correlation between N2 peak latency and clinical measures of inhibition suggested an age-related delay in the inhibition of primed lexical competitors. Taken together, our results indicated intact activation of phonological representation of the picture’s name but age-related delays in inhibition of primed competitors. Interestingly, our findings revealed that delays in inhibiting lexical competitors may begin as early as middle age, highlighting the importance of including multiple age groups to better represent the aging trajectory.     

Viewpoint-dependent Priming Effects in the Perception of Human Actions and Body Postures

The identification of human actions and body postures viewed from different viewpoints was examined in four long-term priming experiments with static pictures of a human model. In Experiments 1 and 2 participants had to name or describe the pictures, and in Experiments 3 and 4 participants had to decide whether the pictures showed a possible or impossible body pose. Reliable priming effects were obtained only when priming and primed action or pose shared the same in-depth orientation (Experiments 1 and 4) and left-right reflection (Experiments 2 and 3). Having seen the same action or pose in a different orientation did not reliably facilitate identification performance later on. Also, there was no priming for poses that are impossible to perform with a human body, not even when an identical same-view prime was used. These findings suggest that the stored representations that mediate the identification of human actions and postures are viewpoint specific.     

Evidence for holistic representations of ignored images and analytic representations of attended images

According to the hybrid theory of object recognition (J. E. Hummel, 2001), ignored object images are represented holistically, and attended images are represented both holistically and analytically. This account correctly predicts patterns of visual priming as a function of translation, scale (B. J. Stankiewicz & J. E. Hummel, 2002), and left-right reflection (B. J. Stankiewicz, J. E. Hummel, & E. E. Cooper, 1998). The model also predicts that priming for attended images will generalize over configural distortions (split images), whereas priming for ignored images will not. Three experiments tested and confirmed this prediction. Split images visually primed their intact and split counterparts when they were attended but not when they were ignored, whereas intact images primed themselves whether they were attended or not. The data contribute to the growing body of evidence that 1 function of visual attention is to permit the generation of explicitly relational representations of object shape.     

Not to be and then to be: visual representation of ignored unfamiliar faces

Negative priming, the increase in response time and/or errors to targets previously encountered as distractors, is explained by inhibitory mechanisms that block the access of distractor representations to response systems. The processing of unfamiliar human faces was investigated using negative priming. Observers viewed a row of faces to decide whether 2 target faces were the same or different. Response latencies were longer when 1 or both targets had appeared as distractors on the immediately preceding trial--evidence that never-before seen faces are represented and require inhibition. Response latencies were shorter when face targets had appeared as distractors, either corrupted with high-frequency noise or contrast inverted--evidence that representations are facilitated. Finally, response latencies remained unaltered when face targets had appeared as upside-down distractors--evidence that not all distractor representations afford response priming. The visual system indeed represents ignored unfamiliar faces, but blocks these representations only if they vie with targets for the control of action.     

Assimilation and contrast in organizational justice: The role of primed mindsets in the psychology of the fair process effect

This paper focuses on the psychology of the fair process effect (the frequently replicated finding that perceived procedural fairness positively affects people's reactions). It is argued that when people have received an outcome they usually assimilate their ratings of outcome fairness and affect toward their experiences of procedural fairness. As a result, ratings show fair process effects. It is also possible, however, that when people have received their outcome they compare this outcome to the procedure they experienced: Is the outcome better or worse than the procedure? A result of this comparison process may be that contrast effects are found such that higher levels of procedural fairness lead to more negative ratings of outcome fairness and affect. Research findings suggest that when comparison goals have been primed, contrast effects indeed can be found. The implications for the psychology of the fair process effect and organizational behavior are discussed.     

The influence of word frequency on the transposed-phoneme priming effect

Speech input like [byt] has been shown to facilitate not only the subsequent processing of an identical target word /byt/ but also that of a target word /tyb/ that contains the same phonemes in a different order. Using the short-term phonological priming paradigm, we examined the role of lexical representations in driving the transposed-phoneme priming effect by manipulating lexical frequency. Results showed that the transposed-phoneme priming effect occurs when targets have a higher frequency than primes, but not when they have a lower frequency. Our findings thus support the view that the transposed-phoneme priming effect results from partial activation of the target word’s lexical representation during prime processing. More generally, our study provides further evidence for a role for position-independent phonemes in spoken word recognition.

     

Automaticity of chronically accessible constructs in person x situation effects on person perception: it's just a matter of time

Models of Person X Situation influences on social behavior and judgement have invoked two distinct mechanisms: a personality disposition and a situational press. In this study we conceptualized both influences in terms of a single underlying mechanism, construct accessibility. We pitted the characteristic ways that individuals perceive others against situational influences on accessibility (i.e., contextual priming) and tracked over time the relative power of these competing influences on the outcome of an impression-formation task. Subjects possessed either a chronically accessible (chronics) or an inaccessible (nonchronics) construct for either outgoing or inconsiderate behavior. As predicted, as the delay since the priming event lengthened (from 15 to 180 s), chronics were progressively more likely to use the chronically accessible construct instead of the primed alternative construct to categorize an ambiguous target behavior, whereas nonchronics' relative use of the primed and alternative constructs did not change as a function of postpriming delay.