Preferences Need No Inferences

Affect is considered by most contempo- rary theories to be postcognitive, that is, to occur only after considerable cognitive operations have been ac- complished. Yet a number of experimental results on preferences, attitudes, impression formation, and de-_ cision making, as well as some clinical phenomena, suggest that affective judgments may be fairly inde- pendent of, and precede in time, the sorts of percep- tual and cognitive operations commonly assumed to be the basis of these affective judgments. Affective re- actions to stimuli are often the very first reactions of the organism, and for lower organisms they are the dominant reactions. Affective reactions can occur without extensive perceptual and cognitive encoding, are made with greater confidence than cognitive judg- ments, and can be made sooner. Experimental evi- dence is presented demonstrating that reliable affec- tive discriminations (like-dislike ratings) can be made in the total absence of recognition memory (old-new judgments). Various differences between judgments based on affect and those based on perceptual and cognitive processes are examined. It is concluded that affect and cognition are under the control of sepa- rate and partially independent systems that can influ- ence each other in a variety of ways, and that both constitute independent sources of effects in information processing.