Contents:
Siebzig Jahre Psychologische Rundschau. Gender congruency from a neutral point of view: The roles of gender classes and conceptual connotations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 44, Multinomial processing trees as theoretical bridges between cognitive and social psychology. The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 69, Psychologische Rundschau, 69, Process models for response-time distributions based on multinomial processing trees with applications to recognition memory.
Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 82 , Thinking and Reasoning, 23 , The Affect Misattribution Procedure: In search of prejudice effects. Experimental Psychology, 64, The joint flanker effect and the joint Simon effect: On the comparability of processes underlying joint compatibility effects. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 70, Spatial instructions increase social Simon effects.
Relevance and reason relations. Cognitive Science, 41, The influence of the Japanese Waving Cat on the joint spatial compatibility effect: A replication and extension of Dolk, Hommel, Prinz, and Liepelt Conditionals, individual variation, and the scorekeeping task. Disentangling form and content with the dual-source model. Cognitive Psychology, 88, Applying processing trees in social psychology. European Review of Social Psychology, 27, The relevance effect and conditionals. Spatial processes in linear ordering. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42, Lady Liberty and Godfather Death as candidates for linguistic relativity?
Scrutinizing the gender congruency effect on personified allegories with explicit and implicit measures. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69, A re-examination of the impact of feature-specific attention allocation on semantic priming effects in the pronunciation task. Seeing more than others: Identification of subtle aggressive information as a function of trait aggressiveness.
Social Psychology, 47, Evaluative priming in the pronunciation task: A preregistered replication and extension. Experimental Psychology, 63, Faking effects on the Affect Misattribution Procedure. Crossing grammar and biology for gender categorizations: Investigating the gender congruency effect in generic nouns for animates.
Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 28, Kognitive Balance und Konsistenz [cognitive balance and consistency]. Social motives and social attitudes] pp. The invariance assumption in process-dissociation models: An evaluation across three domains.
Signal detection and threshold modeling of confidence-rating ROCs: A critical test with minimal assumptions. Psychological Review, , The flexibility of models of recognition memory: The case of confidence ratings. For each category target stimuli: Word stimuli of the modified IAT had neutral or no valence, and nonwords were created out of neutral words by changing two or three letters.
The mean number of characters was comparable for stimuli of all categories mean length varied between 5. Order of presentation of the IATs was counterbalanced across participants. Within each IAT and order condition, all possible initial assignments of categories to responses for the target and attribute categories were realized equally often. For each version of the IAT, half of the participants received compatible response assignments first and the other half of the participants received incompatible response assignments first.
For half of the participants in each version of the IAT, response assignments were switched for the target categories whereas response assignments were switched for the attribute categories for the other participants. All possible factorial combinations were realized equally often. Response assignments were manipulated independently for both IATs.
Additionally, approximately half of all trials in the compatible and incompatible blocks of each type of IAT represented task repetition trials, i. The other half of the trials consisted of task switching trials, in which a classification task that was not performed in the previous trial had to performed attribute classification after target classification or vice versa. Within each IAT, participants first received two practice blocks with only one classification dimension.
In a first block, only the stimuli of the target categories had to be classified, whereas in a second block, the stimuli of the attribute categories of the respective IAT had to be classified. During the practice blocks, each of the target stimuli appeared once. The order of stimulus presentation was randomized for each participant.
In the third block, participants had to classify stimuli of the target and attribute categories simultaneously. During this block, each participant received each stimulus twice, yielding a total of 80 trials that were presented in an individually randomized sequence. Due to the randomization of the stimulus presentation, approximately half of the trials represented task repetition trials, whereas the other half of the trials represented task shifting trials. The first 20 trials of this sequence were presented as practice trials. In a fourth and fifth block, both practice blocks were repeated, inverting the response assignments of either the target categories or the attribute categories see Design.
In a sixth block, participants again received 80 trials of the simultaneous classification task with the first 20 trials serving as practice trials. After a short break, the second IAT was presented in exactly the same fashion as the first. All stimuli were presented in white uppercase letters in the middle of a black computer screen. Category labels were constantly shown at the top right and top left corners of the display, indicating the assignment of categories to responses. In each trial, stimuli remained on the screen until a response was registered. If an incorrect response was made, the stimulus remained on the screen and an error message appeared in red.
The stimulus and error message disappeared after the correct response key had been pressed.
The next stimulus appeared after a delay of ms. Mean response latencies were calculated for compatible and incompatible response assignments separately for the standard and modified versions of the IAT. Unless stated otherwise, reported effects were significant at that level.
Compatibility effects for the standard and modified version of the IAT. Effects of task shifting for the compatible and incompatible blocks of the standard and modified versions of the IAT. In an additional analysis, task shifting task repetition trials vs. As predicted by both the association hypothesis and the figure-ground asymmetry hypothesis, a highly significant compatibility effect was observed in the standard version of the IAT using good and bad words as attribute categories.
As predicted by the figure-ground asymmetry hypothesis only, a highly significant compatibility effect was observed for the modified version of the IAT using neutral words and non-words as attribute categories. This finding cannot be explained by the association hypothesis, because neutral words and non-words have no valence and have no association whatsoever with old and young names.
This finding is convincing evidence for the existence of processes unrelated to associations between target and attribute categories which nevertheless produce strong response compatibility effects in the IAT paradigm. By implication, IAT effects cannot be taken as unambiguous evidence for the existence of such associations. In the present experiment, compatibility effects were stronger for the standard version of the IAT. To explain this finding, one might assume that in the standard version, compatibility effects go back to a joint contribution of association or valence effects and figure-ground asymmetries.
But this assumption is speculative. Differences in the strength of the effects might just as well reflect a difference in the salience of figure-ground asymmetries or other attributes on which the valent words of the standard version and the words and non-words of the modified version might differ. Additional evidence for the figure-ground asymmetry hypothesis comes from the comparison of taskshifting effects in the compatible and incompatible blocks of the combined task.
As predicted by the figure-ground asymmetry hypothesis, this reduction in shift costs was found for both the standard and the modified version of the IAT. This finding rules out an explanation of the interaction effect that is restricted to valence as the mediating feature. One might argue that although the first experiment provides sufficient evidence against the association hypothesis, it might not yet provide sufficient evidence in support of the figure-ground asymmetry hypothesis.
Similar alternative interpretations might in principle be generated for the interaction effect of task shifting and compatibility in the modified version of the IAT. Therefore, in the following experiment we tested the figure-ground asymmetry hypothesis more specifically by a direct experimental manipulation of figure-ground asymmetries that was independent of the categories and stimuli used. The following experiment should also produce additional evidence against the association hypothesis, since manipulating the direction of IAT effects independently of the categories and stimuli used is prima facie incompatible with an explanation of effects in terms of an association between categories or category exemplars.
In the second experiment, only the standard version of the IAT was given to participants old vs. However, the practice blocks requiring binary classifications for the target and attribute categories separately were modified in order to invert the typi-cal figure-ground asymmetry for the target categories. The figure-ground asymmetry hypothesis now predicts an inverted compatibility effect, i.
The association hypothesis, on the other hand, predicts the standard IAT effect, i. Materials and design were the same as in the standard IAT of Experiment 1. Participants had to press either the left orthe right key according to the assignment schedule; see Design of Experiment 1 if and only if a young name was presented. Old names were displayed for ms and then disappeared.
In addition, to enhance the asymmetry, we instructed participants to maximize a point account. That is, participants could gain up to five points by fast go-responses towards young names or lose up to five points by slow go-responses. After each response to a young name, gains were displayed in green and losses were displayed in red.
The actual number of points was always shown above the middle of the screen. Erroneous go-responses to old names were commented with an error message in red and a loss of five points. Participants had to press a key whenever they detected a bad word. Trials were presented in an individually randomized order.
der Experimentellen Psychologie (Classic Reprint) (German Edition) on spezifisch psychologischen Methoden zumachst in der besonderen Aufgabe dieser. April (Classic Reprint) (German Edition) [Theodor Elsenhans] on Vortrag Gehalten auf dem Kongresz für Experimentelle Psychologie zu Gieszen am
In the third block, the standard combined classification task of the IAT was conducted. As in the previous experiment, each stimulus was presented twice in the third block yielding a total of 80 trials, the first twenty of which were used as practice trials.
In the sixth block, the combined classification task was repeated with the reversed response assignment. Presentation parameters were identical to the first experiment. Mean response latencies were calculated for all trials of blocks with compatible and incompatible response assignments. Mean response latencies are shown in Table 1. The result of the second experiment yields strong support for the figure-ground asymmetry hypothe-sis. Inverting the figure-ground asymmetry for the target categories produces an inverted compatibility effect in spite of the fact that target categories and stimuli were identical to the standard version ofthe IAT in the first experiment.
This effect cannotbe explained by an association account of IAT effects since associations of target categories and stimuli were not changed by the manipulation. In fact,on the basis of the association hypothesis, an IAT effect in the opposite direction would have been predicted. The experiments presented in this paper demonstrate a strong influence of figure-ground asymmetries on response compatibility effects in the IAT that are independent of associations between target and attribute categories.
To avoid possible misunderstandings, we explicitly point out the implications we want to draw from the present findings as well as the implications we do not want to draw. Firstly, no attempt was made to rule out the possibility that associations between target and attribute categories can produce IAT effects. Although we argued in the introduction that there is still no satisfactory explanation of how associations influence compatibility effects in the IAT, we did not address this question in our experiments.
We therefore do not claim to have shown that associations do not produce compatibility effects in the IAT nor do we claim to have shown that the IAT would be unable to detect such associations if they existed. By implication, we do not claim to have shown that all IAT effects must be due to figure-ground asymmetries. Our argument is simply that figure-ground asymmetries between the categories of the target and attribute dimensions do produce compatibility effects in the IAT.
The experiments provide positive evidence that figure-ground asymmetries produce strong compatibility effects in the IAT, even in situations where associations or other factors related to the categories or to the exemplar stimuli cannot account for the effects. A straightforward implication of this finding is that since figure-ground asymmetries can produce compatibility effects in the IAT, IAT effects in turn cannot be interpreted as unambiguous evidence for the existence of associations between target and attribute categories.
In a given case, response compatibility effects in the IAT might reflect such associations, figure-ground asymmetries, or any combination of these and possibly other factors as well. Of course, demonstrating that IAT effects are due to figure-ground asymmetries in the target and attribute domains does not rule out the possibility that implicit cognitive associations exist between the target and attribute categories. They might exist, although they are not responsible for the response compatibility effects in the IAT. Alternatively, they might exist and produce - to some extent - the effects observed in the IAT.
Or they might exist and influence figure-ground asymmetries which in turn influence the IAT. But of course, they may well not exist, despite a highly significant IAT effect. Without further information, an unambiguous interpretation of IAT effects is simply impossible. It should be kept in mind that this criticism is not restricted to a use of the IAT as a technique to demonstrate associative structures that are fairly universal - at least for a specified group of persons.
A fortiori , this criticism applies to a usage of the IAT as a diagnostic device for the measurement of individual differences in the strength of such associations. By its very name, the IAT claims to be a psychological test. This kind of usage was obviously intended and propagated by Greenwald et al. Notwithstanding the importance of this objective, the results of the present experiments cast some doubt on the construct validity of the IAT as a diagnostic tool for measuring interindividual differences in the strength of implicit cognitive associations.
It might be a worthwile endeavour for further research to try to disentangle various effects that produce response compatibility effects in the IAT or to develop versions of the IAT that can be more stringently related to implicit cognitive associations. It might therefore be difficult to estimate effects of valence independently of these other factors.
And even if some variant of the IAT might be able to solve these problems, it is doubtful whether it will still yield superior estimates in comparison to other techniques designed to analyse implicit cognitive evaluations and associations which are prima facie insensitive to artifactual effects of figure-ground asymmetries e. In this regard, it is noteworthy that the perhaps most promising technique to measure implicit evaluations - a response-window variant of the evaluative priming paradigm - was invented by Greenwald and colleagues as well see Draine and Greenwald, ; Greenwald et al.
A second implication of our findings is somewhat more speculative. Although we do not claim that figure-ground asymmetries are the only possible source of compatibility effects in the IAT, we nevertheless believe that an account of IAT effects in terms of figure-ground asymmetries is an important one that sheds some light on the interpretation of other findings with the IAT.
As was already mentioned in the introduction, most of the previous IAT studies used target and attribute categories that display a figure-ground asymmetry. This assumption is plausible at least for those dimensions that contain a negative or an unfamiliar category pole, because stimuli of these categories should automatically capture attention Fox et al.
Attentional asymmetries might be a widespread phenomenon when investigating social categories e. In all of these cases, compatibility effects in the IAT can be strongly influenced by figure-ground asymmetries. The figure-ground asymmetry hypothesis might also help to explain the effects of contextual factors e. Context information might sometimes switch the focus of attention which can explain a change in the direction of the IAT effect.
The figure-ground asymmetry hypothesis also can account for some more subtle findings relating to the nature of the mediating processes underlying IAT effects. As was shown in the first experiment, a reduction in task switching effects in the compatible blocks was not restricted to the standard version of the IAT but also emerged in a modified version of the task that did not use valent stimuli or categories on the attribute dimension. In our opinion, the figure-ground asymmetry hypothesis can account for a wide range of findings with the IAT.
Future research might use this explanation of compatibility effects in the IAT in terms of attentional asymmetries within the target and attribute categories as a reference point against which explanations in terms of valence or associations can be tested. Parts of the results presented in this paper were presented at the 7 th Meeting of the Division of Social Psychology, Kassel, Germany, June Exploring the dynamic control of tasks.. Attention and Performance XV: Conscious and nonconscious information processing , pp.
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Their automatic and controlled components..
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Automatic information processing and social perception: The Law of Categorical Judgment Corrected extended: From our point of view, associations between categories must not be equated with similarity or common features think of the distinction between semantic and associative priming, e. This finding is convincing evidence for the existence of processes unrelated to associations between target and attribute categories which nevertheless produce strong response compatibility effects in the IAT paradigm. Share your thoughts with other customers. Familiarity effects - if there are any, see above - can be explained with a similar logic.
Psychological Review , , Three cognitive markers of unconscious semantic activation.. Science , , Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The Implicit Association Test.. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 74, Does linguistic marking have a psychological correlate?. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior , 10,