15:00 - 16:30
Talk Session VII
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15:00 - 16:30
Wed-HS1-Talk VII-
Wed-Talk VII-
Room: HS1
Chair/s:
Simone Malejka
Can we detect regularities in our environment and adapt behavior accordingly in the absence of awareness? The demonstration of unconscious (implicit) cognition hinges on participants’ unawareness of stimuli, processes, or products involved in a task. The gold standard is to establish an indirect-without-direct effect, that is, an uninstructed effect of a stimulus on behavior under conditions that preclude any effect of the stimulus on a response according to explicit instructions. This symposium will bring together researchers working on new methods tailored to investigate the possibility of indirect-without-direct effects. The first two talks will present novel indirect and direct
measures for well-known experimental paradigms. Sascha Meyen will demonstrate a new test of reaction-time differences, which offers an improved indirect measure and provides evidence against unconscious processing in contextual cueing. In the area of priming, Thomas Schmidt will talk about a new theory of visibility focusing on the critical stimulus feature that generates the indirect effect and must be assessed in the direct measure. The final three talks will present new analyses for data that presumably show an indirect-without-direct pattern. These data often suffer from regression to the mean (RttM), defined as the statistical phenomenon that makes natural variation in repeated data look like real change. When direct measures are contaminated with measurement error, low awareness scores will tend to be followed by awareness scores closer to the mean. Itay Yaron will outline a solution to the RttM problem that uses a widely applicable bootstrapping algorithm based only on a small set of assumptions. Simone Malejka will present a method of true-score estimation based on the Bayesian principle of shrinkage, which corrects noisy data and can solve RttM and related measurement biases. Lastly, Zoltan Dienes will demonstrate how Bayes factors can provide evidence for (or against) one’s theory in the presence of measurement error by testing an interval null hypothesis of zero awareness in post-hoc trial selection.
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Missing Evidence for Implicit Recognition: The Indirect Task Advantage in Contextual Cueing
Wed-HS1-Talk VII-01
Presented by: Sascha Meyen
Sascha Meyen 1, Miguel A. Vadillo 2, Ulrike von Luxburg 1, 3, Volker H. Franz 1
1 Department of Computer Science, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany, 2 Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain, 3 Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, Germany
Studies on unconscious or implicit cognitive capacities often rely on a problematic standard reasoning. For example, in the contextual cueing paradigm, evidence for implicit memory is inferred from a pattern of two results: First, repeated stimulus configurations produce faster mean reaction times (RT) than new ones. Second, when participants are asked directly to discriminate repeated vs. new stimulus configurations, their explicit recognition sensitivity is close to chance. Researchers routinely infer that the recognition sensitivity driving RT effects is larger than the sensitivity of explicit responses—a situation we call Indirect Task Advantage (ITA). Based on this ITA, researchers infer recognition that goes beyond participants’ explicit memory, that is, implicit recognition. The problem with this standard reasoning: Sensitivities underlying RT effects are never calculated. An appropriate analysis to establish an ITA is the sensitivity comparison in which sensitivities from the RT data are computed and compared against explicit recognition sensitivity. In a preregistered reanalysis, we apply this appropriate method to 20 studies in the contextual cueing paradigm and find no evidence for ITAs. Thus, the empirical basis for claims about implicit recognition is lacking and interpretations in this paradigm—but likely also in others using the standard reasoning—require serious reevaluation.
Keywords: implicit memory, contextual cueing, indirect task advantage
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