The Role of Consciousness in Priming Effects on Categorization

Consciousness of a priming event at the time information about the event is retrieved from memory is argued to make a qualitative difference as to the consequences of the prime for subsequent social judgments. Two experiments are reported that provide evidence bearing on this hypothesis. Experiment 1 demonstrated that whether or not subjects can recall any of the priming stimuli presented in a first task dramatically influences which of two evaluatively dissimilar primed constructs they subsequently use in their categorizations of a target description. Subjects who could recall one or more primes showed contrast effects with regard to the more accessible construct, whereas subjects who could not recall any primes showed assimilation effects. Experiment 2 showed that interruption of the priming task resulted in assimilation effects for both the recall and the no-recall subjects. Together, these findings suggest that the function of consciousness of the priming events is to enable subjects to process subsequent information relevant to the primed constructs more flexibly. The results of both studies are discussed in terms of their relevance for theoretical distinctions between episodic and semantic memory and between automatic and controlled cognitive processing.

[1]  P. Herr,et al.  Consequences of priming: Judgment and behavior. , 1986 .

[2]  L. L. Martin,et al.  Set/reset: use and disuse of concepts in impression formation. , 1986, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[3]  E. Tulving.  Memory and consciousness. , 1985 .

[4]  J. Bargh,et al.  Nature of Priming Effects on Categorization , 1985 .

[5]  G. Mandler,et al.  Activation makes words more accessible, but not necessarily more retrievable. , 1984 .

[6]  P. Herr,et al.  On the consequences of priming: Assimilation and contrast effects , 1983 .

[7]  J. Bargh,et al.  Automatic information processing and social perception: The influence of trait information presented outside of conscious awareness on impression formation. , 1982 .

[8]  J. Bargh.  Attention and Automaticity in the Processing of Self-Relevant Information , 1982 .

[9]  Daniel L. Schacter,et al.  Priming effects in word-fragment completion are independent of recognition memory. , 1982 .

[10]  L. Jacoby,et al.  Remembering without awareness , 1982 .

[11]  L. Jacoby,et al.  On the relationship between autobiographical memory and perceptual learning. , 1981, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[12]  G. Logan.  Attention and automaticity in Stroop and priming tasks: Theory and data , 1980, Cognitive Psychology.

[13]  E. Tory Higgins,et al.  Accessibility of interrelational constructs: Implications for stimulus encoding and creativity. , 1980 .

[14]  T. K. Srull,et al.  The Role of Category Accessibility in the Interpretation of Information About Persons: Some Determinants and Implications , 1979 .

[15]  Walter Schneider,et al.  Controlled and automatic human information processing: II. Perceptual learning, automatic attending and a general theory. , 1977 .

[16]  W. S. Rholes,et al.  Category accessibility and impression formation , 1977 .

[17]  J. Reitman.  Without surreptitious rehearsal, information in short-term memory decay , 1974 .

[18]  F. Craik,et al.  Levels of Pro-cessing: A Framework for Memory Research , 1975 .

[19]  R. Schvaneveldt,et al.  Facilitation in recognizing pairs of words: evidence of a dependence between retrieval operations. , 1971, Journal of experimental psychology.

[20]  L. R. Peterson,et al.  Short-term retention of individual verbal items. , 1959, Journal of experimental psychology.

[21]  John Brown.  Some Tests of the Decay Theory of Immediate Memory , 1958 .