A Double Dissociation between Conscious and Non-conscious Priming of Responses and Affect: Evidence for a Contribution of Misattributions to the Priming of Affect

Abstract

Studies have demonstrated conscious and non-conscious priming of responses and of affect. Concerning response priming, presenting a target-related (congruent) distractor prior to a target typically facilitates target responses. This facilitation - the response-priming effect - is observed in comparison to a less related (incongruent) distractor. An incongruent distractor would interfere with the required response to the target. This response-priming effect is found with both conscious distractors, of which participants are aware, and non-conscious distractors, of which participants are not aware. In partly related research, distractors have also yielded affective priming effects on the evaluations of task-unrelated neutral symbols that followed the target: In comparison to the congruent condition, participants evaluated a neutral symbol presented after an incongruent distractor-target sequence as more negative. This affective priming effect was sometimes ascribed to the participants' misattributions of distractor-target conflict to the unrelated neutral symbols. Here, we set out to test this possibility. If the misattribution explanation of affective priming holds true, affective priming would be stronger with non-conscious than with conscious distractors: Mostly the non-conscious distractors would mask distractor-target conflict as the true affect-origin and, therefore, invite participants' misattribution of the primed affect to the neutral symbol in temporal vicinity. In contrast, only with conscious distractors, participants would be aware of distractor-target conflict as the true affect-origin and should, therefore, be better able to attribute their affective responses to the distractor-target relationship itself. In three experiments, we confirmed this prediction of a stronger affective priming effect in non-conscious than conscious distractor conditions, while at the same time showing conscious response-priming effects to even exceed non-conscious response-priming effects. Together, these results amount to a double dissociation between affective priming, being stronger with unconscious distractors, and response priming, being stronger with conscious distractors. This double dissociation supports the misattribution explanation and makes clear that the amount of distractor-elicited response conflict alone does not account for the amount of affective priming. Moreover, the participants' unawareness of the distractors is critical for the amount of affective priming of neutral symbols in temporal vicinity.

Keywords: conflict; flanker task; masking; misattributions of affect; non-conscious processing.

FIGURE 1

Example trials of Experiments 1, 2, and 3, with time flowing from bottom to top. The left side depicts a congruent conscious trial, the right side depicts an incongruent non-conscious trial. Note that only in one third of the trials, participants had to rate a Chinese symbol. The figure is not drawn to scale.

FIGURE 2

Mean reaction time (RT) to target shapes (Left) and percentage of negative ratings of neutral symbols (Right) for Experiment 1. Congruent and incongruent trials are indicated on the x-axis. The separate lines illustrate conscious (solid lines) and non-conscious (dashed lines) trials. Error bars represent standard error of the mean (SEM).

FIGURE 3

Mean RT to target shapes (Left) and percentage of negative ratings of neutral symbols (Right) for Experiment 2. Congruent and incongruent trials are indicated on the x-axis. The separate lines illustrate conscious (solid lines) and non-conscious (dashed lines) trials. Error bars represent SEM.

FIGURE 4

Mean RT to target shapes (Left) and percentage of negative ratings of neutral symbols (Right) for Experiment 3. Congruent and incongruent trials are indicated on the x-axis. The separate lines illustrate conscious (solid lines) and non-conscious (dashed lines) trials. Error bars represent SEM.