ABSTRACT-Influences of perceptual and motor activity on evaluation have led to theories of embodied cognition suggesting that putatively complex judgments can be carried out using only perceptual and motor representations. We present an experiment that revisited a movement-compatibility effect in which people are faster to respond to positive words by pulling a lever than by pushing a lever and are faster to respond to negative words by pushing than by pulling. We demonstrate that the compatibility effect depends on people's representation of their selves in space rather than on their physical location. These data suggest that accounting for embodied phenomena requires understanding the complex interplay between perceptual and motor representations and people's representations of their selves in space.

There has been significant interest in indirect measures of attitudes like the lmplicit Association Test (IAT), presumably because of the possibility of uncovering implicit prejudices. The authors derived a set of qualitative predictions for people's performance in the IAT on the basis of random walk models. These were supported in 3 experiments comparing clearly positive or negative categories to nonwords. They also provided evidence that participants shift their response criterion when doing the IAT. Because of these criterion shifts, a response panem in the IAT can have multiple causes. Thus, it is not possible to infer a single cause (such as prejudice) from IAT results. A surprising additional result was that nonwords were treated a. though they were evaluated more negatively than obviously negative items like insects, suggesting that low familiarity items may generate the pattern of data previously interpreted as evidence for implicit prejudice. What do you think of flowers? Would you evaluate them positively? If so, what do you think of Larnists? D o you think a Larnist is more negative or more positive than a flower? As you may have realized, a Larnist is not an English word; we made it up. Presumably, you do not have a prestored opinion of Larnists, and so you would have to compute it ad hoc. Pretend for a moment that Larnists are people who live in houses with odd-numbered addresses. If we provided you with evidence that you are less likely to associate Larnists than flowers with pleasant words, would you conclude that you are prejudiced against people who live in odd-numbered houses? We suggest not, because you probably have no prior evaluation of Larnists (i.e., people who live in odd-numbered houses) in general. It would seem safer to conclude that something other than a prior evaluation of Larnists must have produced your behavior. In this article, we explore recent research on the indirect measurement of individual differences in attitudes. This work claims to uncover implicit prejudices that may not be consciously accessible to the people who hold them. We focus our discussion on measures that are based on response competition, specifically on the Implicit Association Test (IAT) presented by Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz (1998), which is the best developed measure of implicit evaluations. We begin by discussing definitions of prejudice to know what these tests aim to measure. Then, we describe the IAT in detail. Next, we present qualitative predictions for people's performance on this task derived from random walk models. Finally, we test these predictions, and discuss the implications of this work for indirect measures of attitudes.

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It is commonly assumed that an object capable of satisfying a need will be perceived as subjectively more valuable as the need for it intensifies. For example, the more active the need to eat, the more valuable food will become. This outcome could be called a valuation effect. In this article, we suggest a second basic influence of needs on evaluations: that activating a focal need (e.g., to eat) makes objects unrelated to that need (e.g., shampoo) less valuable, an outcome we refer to as the devaluation effect. Two existing studies support the existence of a devaluation effect using manipulations of the need to eat and to smoke and measuring attractiveness of consumer products and willingness to purchase raffle tickets. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that consumers are not aware of the devaluation effect and its influence on their preferences.