Implicit Memory for Auditorily Presented Threatening Stimuli: A Process-Dissociation Approach

Abstract

The investigation of unconscious cognition involves especially problems with the methodology of measuring implicit and explicit proportions of different task performances. In this study the process dissociation procedure of Jacoby and its modification within the multinomial modelling framework for an indirect word-nonword-discrimination task is applied to a sample of 45 healthy students. The paradigm includes acoustically presented stimuli. During a learning phase, subjects listened to a series of neutral and threatening words. Performance was tested by letting subjects decide whether a presented stimulus (masked with white noise at signal-noise ratio of -17 dB or unmasked) had been a word or a nonword. Within this paradigm, implicit cognition occurs when (a) a word is more probably correctly recognized as "word" after presentation during the learning phase (typical priming effect) or when (b) a nonword derived from a word is more probably falsely recognized as "word" after its corresponding word had been presented during the learning phase (effect of implicit cognition given perceptual fluency). Frequencies for hits and false alarms were analyzed within the multinomial model which allows estimating parameters for the correct discrimination of words (c), the response bias (b), the classical priming effect (u1), and the parameter for the priming effect of "old" nonwords (u2). Under masked stimuli the multinomial model showed implicit cognition, an effect not equally found for neutral and threatening words. Threatening words exhibited a significantly higher portion of implicit cognition than neutral ones. Given the statistical complexity of multinomial models, the application of this method was explained in detail.

Impact of Chronic Somatoform and Osteoarthritis Pain on Conscious and Preconscious Cognitive Processing

“…In order to hamper a conscious decision, the stimuli were masked by white noise during the test phase with a constant signal-noise ratio of -17dB. This was done using a standardized algorithm proposed by Ott & Curio (28) and Ott, Curio, and Scholz (29).…”

“…Ott et al (29) have shown that in the white-noise condition, the probability of correctly identifying a target word significantly differs from the probability of identifying a word without this noise. There was evidence that under the noise condition the probability of implicit preconscious schema-guided processing is elevated.…”