Implicit volition and stereotype control

Goals are mental representations that vary in accessibility and operate within goal systems. The implicit nature of goal activation and pursuit is shown here to make goals effective not merely at overturning the influence of an activated stereotype on how people respond to members of stereotyped groups, but effective at implicitly controlling the activation of stereotypes in the first place. In a set of experiments examining chronic egalitarian goals, faces and names of members of stereotyped groups presented as target stimuli led to the inhibition of stereotypes, as well as to the heightened accessibility of egalitarian goals. A separate set of experiments illustrate a similar ability of individuals to control stereotype activation when egalitarian goals are temporarily triggered within a context, rather than being chronically held. Goals that require one to inhibit stereotypic associations to a target can lead to the intended, yet implicit, control of stereotype activation, even when one is not aware the goal is active or being pursued or being regulated.     

Unconscious and out of control: Subliminal priming is insensitive to observer expectations

We asked whether the influence of an invisible prime on movement is dependent on conscious movement expectations. Participants reached to a central target, which triggered a directional prime–mask arrow sequence. Participants were instructed that the visible arrows (masks) would most often signal a movement modification in a specific (biased) direction. Kinematic analyses revealed that responses to the visible mask were influenced by participants’ intentional bias, as movements were fastest when the more probable mask was displayed. In addition, responses were influenced by the invisible prime without regard to its relationship to the more probable mask. Analysis of the time of initial trajectory modifications revealed that both primes influenced responses in a similar manner after accounting for participants’ bias. These results imply that invisible stimuli automatically activate their associated responses and that unconscious priming of the motor system is insensitive to the conscious expectations of the participant making the pointing movements.     

Estructura morfológica y recuperación léxica

Resumen

El objetivo principal de esta investigación es el de contribuir a un mayor conocimiento del papel que desempeña la estructura morfológica de las palabras en la organización del léxico interno y, por consiguiente, en las estrategias que emplean los sujetos para acceder a la representación mental de las palabras. Más en concreto, se trata de ver cuál es la relación existente entre la representación de la forma base de una palabra (por ej., flor) y la de formas derivadas de la misma (por ej., florero, florecer, florido) de cara a una posible simplificación del inventario mental de entradas léxicas.

Se han realizado tres experimentos, basados en una tarea de decisión léxica y en la utilización de la técnica de «priming» o presentación previa de un supuesto elemento facilitador del reconocimiento de cada estímulo. Se midió la latencia de respuesta para clasificar los estímulos como palabras o no-palabras del idioma. Los dos primeros experimentos se efectuaron bajo la modalidad visual de reconocimiento y el tercero, bajo la modalidad auditiva. En todos los casos, las comparaciones relevantes se establecen entre los TRs correspondientes a una misma palabra en condiciones experimentales diferentes: según vaya precedida por sí misma, o por una relacionada morfológicamente, o cuando no vaya precedida ni por sí misma ni por otra relacionada (condición de control).

Los resultados obtenidos bajo las dos modalidades perceptivas son coincidentes y ponen de manifiesto que: 1) se da un efecto de facilitación en el reconocimiento, tanto al presentar una palabra precedida por sí misma (repetición) como al presentarla precedida por otra relacionada morfológicamente; 2) el efecto de facilitación por repetición es significativamente superior al de facilitación por relación morfológica; y 3) dentro de este último no aparecen diferencias significativas entre la facilitación de la forma base por la derivada y la de ésta por aquélla.

Estos resultados se interpretan a la luz de los distintos modelos propuestos acerca de la representación léxica. Sin que sean cruciales para decidirse por uno de ellos en contra de los otros, sí que parecen apoyar la existencia de un código de representación abstracto que aglutina familias de palabras relacionadas morfológicamente en torno a una misma entrada léxica. En cualquier caso, y aun suponiendo que hubiera entradas léxicas distintas para cada forma particular, sería preciso postular algún mecanismo adicional que diera cuenta del papel que desempeña la información morfológica en la organización general del léxico interno.     

‘Be careful,or you'll act corruptly and make a carved image for yourselves,in the form of a figure,the likeness male or female’ (Deut. 4:16): A commentary on Norenzayan's Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (2013)

Norenzayan's book is an ambitious attempt to integrate recent research from behavioral economics and social psychology, particularly priming studies, into a book about religion. If the account is meant as an explanation of religion or big religion, it does not succeed. If it has more modest aims, namely to describe how surveillance institutions, of which big religion is one important class, can sometimes lead to cooperation and conflict, then it is quite successful in doing so.     

Evidence for Implicit Learning in Syntactic Comprehension

This study provides evidence for implicit learning in syntactic comprehension. By reanalyzing data from a syntactic priming experiment (Thothathiri & Snedeker, 2008), we find that the error signal associated with a syntactic prime influences comprehenders' subsequent syntactic expectations. This follows directly from error‐based implicit learning accounts of syntactic priming, but it is unexpected under accounts that consider syntactic priming a consequence of temporary increases in base‐level activation. More generally, the results raise questions about the principles underlying the maintenance of implicit statistical knowledge relevant to language processing, and about possible functional motivations for syntactic priming.     

Dynamic Simulation and Static Matching for Action Prediction: Evidence From Body Part Priming

Accurately predicting other people's actions may involve two processes: internal real‐time simulation (dynamic updating) and matching recently perceived action images (static matching). Using a priming of body parts, this study aimed to differentiate the two processes. Specifically, participants played a motion‐controlled video game with either their arms or legs. They then observed arm movements of a point‐light actor, which were briefly occluded from view, followed by a static test pose. Participants judged whether this test pose depicted a coherent continuation of the previously seen action (i.e., “action prediction task”). Evidence of dynamic updating was obtained after compatible effector priming (i.e., arms), whereas incompatible effector priming (i.e., legs) indicated static matching. Together, the results support action prediction as engaging two distinct processes, dynamic simulation and static matching, and indicate that their relative contributions depend on contextual factors like compatibility of body parts involved in performed and observed action.     

The effects of a positive health priming intervention on somatic complaints

Somatic complaints are common and form a major burden. Previous studies suggested that such complaints might be increased by ‘illness-related memory’, for example due to worries about health. In this ambulatory study we tested whether we could decrease somatic complaints through enhancing the activation of health-related memory by a ‘positive health’-priming intervention. Forty-three students were randomly assigned to the ‘positive health’-group or a control group. Using online measures, participants reported negative affect (NA) and somatic complaints for a period of six days, while each morning performing the priming task. The intervention caused a decrease in somatic complaints but only for participants with low trait NA or low somatosensory amplification. These findings seem to suggest that priming or other interventions directed at activating positive health memory might reduce health complaints, but only in certain subgroups.     

Book Review

Repetition priming is one of the most robust phenomena in cognitive psychology, but participants vary substantially on the amount of priming that they produce. The current experiments assessed the reliability of repetition priming within individuals. The results suggest that observed differences in the size of the repetition priming effect across participants are largely reliable and result primarily from systematic processes. We conclude that the unreliability of semantic priming observed by Stolz, Besner, and Carr (2005) is specific to uncoordinated processes in semantic memory, and that this unreliability does not generalize to other processes in visual word recognition. We consider the implications of these results for theories of automatic and controlled processes that contribute to priming. Finally, we emphasize the importance of reliability for researchers who use similar paradigms to study individual and group differences in cognition.     

The influence of visual short-term memory on size perception

We show that perceived size of visual stimuli can be altered by matches between the contents of visual short-term memory and stimuli in the scene. Observers were presented with a colour cue (to hold in working memory or to merely identify) and subsequently had to indicate which of the two different-coloured objects presented simultaneously on the screen appeared bigger (or smaller). One of the two objects for size judgements had the same colour as the cue (matching stimulus) and the other did not (mismatching stimulus). Perceived object size was decreased by the reappearance of the recently seen cue, as there were more size judgement errors on trials where the matching stimulus was physically bigger (relative to the mismatching stimulus) than on trials where the matching stimulus was physically smaller. The effect occurred regardless of whether the visual cue was actively maintained in working memory or was merely identified. The effect was unlikely generated by the allocation of attention, because shifting attention to a visual stimulus actually increased its perceived size. The findings suggest that visual short-term memory, whether explicit or implicit, can decrease the perceived size of subsequent visual stimuli.     

Visual experience is not necessary for efficient survey spatial cognition: Evidence from blindness

This study investigated whether the lack of visual experience affects the ability to create spatial inferential representations of the survey type. We compared the performance of persons with congenital blindness and that of blindfolded sighted persons on four survey representation-based tasks (Experiment 1). Results showed that persons with blindness performed better than blindfolded sighted controls. We repeated the same tests introducing a third group of persons with late blindness (Experiment 2). This last group performed better than blindfolded sighted participants, whereas differences between participants with late and congenital blindness were nonsignificant. The present findings are compatible with results of other studies, which found that when visual perception is lacking, skill in gathering environmental spatial information provided by nonvisual modalities may contribute to a proper spatial encoding. It is concluded that, although it cannot be asserted that total lack of visual experience incurs no cost, our findings are further evidence that visual experience is not a necessary condition for the development of spatial inferential complex representations.