Age-related priming effects in social judgments.

Two experiments investigated adult age differences in the impact of previously activated (and thus easily accessible) trait-related information on judgments about people. The authors hypothesized that age-related declines in the efficiency of controlled processing mechanisms during adulthood would be associated with increased susceptibility to judgment biases associated with such information. In each study, different-aged adults made impression judgments about a target, and assimilation of these judgments to trait constructs activated in a previous, unrelated task were examined. Consistent with the authors' hypotheses, older adults were likely to form impressions that were biased toward the primed trait constructs. In contrast, younger adults exhibited greater awareness of the primed information and were more likely to correct for its perceived influence, especially when distinctive contextual cues regarding the source of the primes were available. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intuition, affect, and personality: Unconscious coherence judgments and self-regulation of negative affect.

According to personality systems interaction theory, a negative mood was expected to reduce access to extended semantic networks and to reduce performance on intuitive judgments of coherence for participants who have an impaired ability to down-regulate negative affect (i.e., state-oriented participants). Consistent with expectations, state-oriented participants reporting higher levels of perseverating negative mood had a reduced discrimination between coherent and incoherent standard word triples (Study 1) and individually derived word triples describing persons (Study 2). Participants who are able to down-regulate negative affect (i.e., action-oriented participants) did not show this tendency. In addition, Study 2 revealed a dissociation between state orientation and Neuroticism that is discussed in terms of a functional difference between the two constructs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recognition memory and familiarity judgments in severe amnesia: No evidence for a contribution of repetition priming.

The amnesic patient E.P. has demonstrated normal levels of repetition priming and at-chance recognition performance (S. B. Hamann & L. R. Squire, 1997), suggesting that the sense of familiarity used to make a recognition memory judgment is not based on the same mechanism responsible for repetition priming. However, the recognition tests previously used may have discouraged the use of familiarity and encouraged reliance on episodic memory. This issue was addressed in 5 experiments with E.P., 3 other amnesic patients with hippocampal damage, and 8 healthy controls. In Experiments 1–3, which were designed to discourage the use of episodic memory, the amnesic patients were impaired and E.P. performed at chance. In Experiments 4 and 5A, a stem-completion priming task was combined with a recognition memory task on each trial. E.P.'s priming was intact, yet his recognition memory performance was at chance. This suggests that although recognition memory judgments may be made on the basis of familiarity, repetition priming is not the source of this feeling of familiarity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Automatic semantic priming: Effect of category exemplar level and word association level.

Evaluated semantic priming when the prime was masked below naming threshold and the target was named in 4 experiments with 263 undergraduates. Exp I showed that when word primes were masked and word targets were named, prior knowledge of the related pairs did not alter semantic priming. Semantic priming within categories occurred only when the prime stimulus was the 1st category exemplar. Findings of Exp II indicate that when masked pictures were used as primes, semantic priming for word targets was sensitive to the category exemplar level of the prime but not to the category exemplar level of the target. Word association norms collected in Exp III did not support the hypothesis that the effect of category exemplar level was mediated by the strength of word association. Exp IV revealed significant semantic priming for masked picture primes and within-category word targets, regardless of the level of word association between prime and target. Exp IV also demonstrated semantic priming for high word association targets that were not members of the same semantic category. For all experiments, Ss with the longest average reaction times (RTs) also showed the largest semantic priming effect for naming word targets. It is suggested that viewing one of the highest ranking category exemplars activates the memory representation of the category, perhaps because such prototypic exemplars are contained within the category concept itself. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Unconscious self-evaluation using a stereoscope.

"Each subject was presented with his own photograph in a stereoscope, together with that of a stranger, so that a single composite face was seen… . subjects who did not recognize themselves under these conditions were then asked to rate this self-composite for degree of attractiveness, and each subject's rating was compared with one that he made on a control composite consisting of two strange faces. Confirmation was obtained for the hypothesis that the self-composite would be rated higher than the control, thus lending support for the theory of the favorableness of unconscious self-judgments." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Unconscious acquisition of complex procedural knowledge.

In two experiments, subjects were exposed for 12 hr to a sequence of frames containing a target, and their task was to search for the target in each frame. The sequence was divided into logical blocks of seven trials each. Locations of the target in the seventh trial of each block were predictable on the basis of the specific sequences of target locations in four out of the previous six trials. Pilot studies and extensive postexperimental interviews indicated that none of the subjects noticed anything even close to the real nature of the manipulation (i.e., the pattern). However, the predicted patterns of latency of their responses to the critical trials indicate that they had, in fact, acquired some intuitive (unconscious) knowledge about how the pattern of prior trials was related to the critical trial. The phenomenon is discussed as a ubiquitous unconscious process involved in the development of both elementary and high-level cognitive skills. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Unconscious mood-congruent memory bias in depression.

The purpose of this study was to investigate an unconscious or implicit mood-congruent memory (MCM) bias in clinical depression. Many studies have shown an explicit memory bias, but no study has yet found an implicit MCM bias in clinical depression. The authors compared depressed and control group participants on a conceptually driven implicit memory test. After studying words of positive, neutral, and negative affective valences, participants produced free associations to various cues. Implicit memory or priming was demonstrated by the production of more studied than unstudied words to the association cues. Depressed participants showed more priming of negative words, whereas controls showed more priming of positive words, thus supporting the MCM pattern. Also, no implicit memory deficit was found in depressed participants. These findings are discussed in the context of several prominent theories of cognition and depression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Episodic retrieval in negative priming and repetition priming.

Subjects identified target letters flanked by incompatible distractor letters (e.g., ABA). Distractor onset was randomly simultaneous with target onset or was delayed by 400 ms. In Experiment 1, one third of probe-trial targets were identical to the preceding prime-trial distractor. Responses were slower to repeated letters than to unrepeated letters (negative priming) only when prime and probe trials shared the same distractor-onset conditions. In Experiment 2, one third of probe-trial targets were identical to the preceding prime-trial target. Significant facilitation (repetition priming) occurred for repeated targets in all conditions but was again greater when prime and probe trials shared the same distractor-onset conditions. The results strongly support episodic retrieval theories of both negative priming and repetition priming and suggest that a common mechanism underlies both phenomena. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Factors influencing disciplinary judgments.

Studied the influence of individual and organizational factors on disciplinary judgment, using disciplinary exercise administered to 222 undergraduate business students. In 4 separate discipline cases, the severity of organizational consequences for a rule infraction and various characteristics of the offenders were manipulated. When the same rule violation resulted in severe compared to mild organizational consequences, greater personal responsibility was attributed to the offender and harsher disciplinary measures were recommended. Offender characteristics such as status, talent, performance, and compensation equity also influenced disciplinary judgments. Results are discussed in terms of current theories of attribution and in terms of practical considerations regarding fair and consistent administration of discipline. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Overconfidence in case-study judgments.

This study investigated whether psychologists' confidence in their clinical decisions is really justified. It was hypothesized that as psychologists study information about a case (a) their confidence about the case increases markedly and steadily but (b) the accuracy of their conclusions about the case quickly reaches a ceiling. 32 judges, including 8 clinical psychologists, read background information about a published case, divided into 4 sections. After reading each section of the case, judges answered a set of 25 questions involving personality judgments about the case. Results strongly supported the hypotheses. Accuracy did not increase significantly with increasing information, but confidence increased steadily and significantly. All judges except 2 became overconfident, most of them markedly so. Clearly, increasing feelings of confidence are not a sure sign of increasing predictive accuracy about a case. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Testing through relationship judgments.

To evaluate the effectiveness of instruction fully and to motivate learning, it is important to test students' knowledge of the structural interrelationships that exist among concepts in a domain. Many methods of evaluating structural knowledge are highly subjective, excessively time-consuming to construct and score, or both. The present study describes a method of testing structural knowledge that reduces these problems. Approximately 120 undergraduates completed unit exams consisting of a multiple-choice test over knowledge of individual concepts, an essay test covering relationships among concepts, and a relationship judgments test that required rating the strength of relationships between concepts presented in pairs. Correlations between scores on the tests support the conclusion that relationship-judgment tests provide a valid means of assessing knowledge of both individual concepts and structural knowledge. (26 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Faculty judgments of graduate success.

All doctoral candidates in the Department of Psychology and Psychiatry at the Catholic University of America who had been in graduate study 1 full academic year or more (N = 61) were evaluated by the faculty on a 7-unit scale for each of 8 variables (interpersonal relations, effective energy, emotional stability, professional identification, written communication, research ability, critical scholarship, and over-all judgment). The matrix resulting from the intercorrelated scales was "factored by the complete centroid method until 2 factors were abstracted"—one called academic-scientific excellence and the other called personality. From Psyc Abstracts 36:02:2AM81S. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interdependence of successive absolute judgments.

The aim was "to determine whether successive absolute judgments of a cognitive nature are interdependent, and if so, to evaluate a method for controlling this bias." The design involved rating populations of countries, with one group of Ss rating a "test" country following rating of a sparsely populated one and a second group following the rating of a populous country. This type of design was used several times in longer lists of words. Results of 8 test items indicated that "ratings tend to be biased in the direction of the previous rating… bias increases as the number of response categories increases." When the Ss were instructed to rate extreme stimuli first, no bias effect was found. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Grouping information for judgments.

Models of cue weighting in judgment have typically focused on how decision-makers weight cues individually. Here, the authors propose that people might recognize and weight groups of cues. They examine how judgments change when decision-makers focus on cues individually or as parts of groups. Several experiments demonstrate that people can spontaneously pack information into cue groups. Moreover, group-level weighting depends on how people assess similarity or how they think of categorical hierarchies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Unconscious Primes Activate Motor Codes Through Semantics.

Today, it is generally accepted that unconscious stimuli can activate a response code, which leads to a response congruency effect (RCE) on a subsequent target. However, it is not yet clear whether this is due to the semantic processing of the primes or to the formation of direct stimulus-response (S-R) associations bypassing the semantic system. Recently, it was shown that even novel primes, for which no direct S-R links exist, can also evoke an RCE that is in line with the activation of response codes through semantics. In these experiments, the authors examined 3 alternatives for this RCE from novel primes and report a novel effect in unconscious priming. First, the authors show that this effect is not limited to a small set of numerical stimuli but also extends to letter stimuli (Experiments 1-3). Second, the authors show that the RCE is not a side effect of the prime-target distance effect, as has been reported before (Experiments 1-2). Third, the authors found that, for RCE to occur, overlap at the motor level but not at the semantic level was crucial (Experiments 2-3). Finally, in addition, the results showed a category match priming effect independent of RCE. This last result is evidence that novel unconscious primes activate their semantic category prior to the target and might be considered a good marker for semantic processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's judgments of expected value.

Expected value judgments of 5-, 6-, 8-, and 10-yr-olds were studied by using an information integration approach. Children saw roulette-type games with prizes of crayons. They made judgments in a continuous scale of how happy a puppet playing the game would be. In one task, probability and value of a single winning outcome were varied factorially. All ages took both cues into account. Young children used an additive integration rule, whereas children 8 yrs and older used the multiplying rule as predicted by mathematical theory. A 2nd task contained games with both 1 and 2 alternative prizes. At all ages, data patterns were similar to the normative predictions. Even young children showed some understanding of probability dependence. A serial version of the addition strategy may contribute to advanced performance in the 2-prize task. These results are consistent with conceptual understanding of expected value. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Unconscious knowledge of artificial grammars is applied strategically.

The criteria by which incidentally acquired knowledge of an artificial grammar (A. S. Reber, 1967) could be unconscious was explored in 5 experiments. Participants trained on an artificial grammar lacked metaknowledge of their knowledge: Participants classified substantially above chance even when they believed that they were literally guessing, and, under some conditions, participants' confidence in incorrect decisions was just as great as their confidence in correct decisions. However, participants had a large degree of strategic control over their knowledge: Participants trained on 2 grammars could decide which grammar to apply in a test phase, and there was no detectable tendency for participants to apply the other grammar. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Determinants of negative priming.

The negative priming task is widely used to investigate attentional inhibition. A critical review of the negative priming literature considers various parameters of the task (e.g., time course, relation to interference, level of occurrence, and susceptibility to changes in task context). It also takes into account life span data and the performance of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia. On these bases, the review suggests that negative priming can be produced by 2 mechanisms: memorial and inhibitory. With respect to inhibition, the review suggests that (a) there are 2 systems, one responsible for identity and the other for location information; and (b) inhibition is a flexible, postselection process operating to prevent recently rejected information from quickly regaining access to effectors, thus helping to establish coherence among selected thought and action streams. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)