Biomedical subjects

Andrea Kiesel

Publications and source records attributed to Andrea Kiesel.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Negative congruency effects: a test of the inhibition account.

Masked priming experiments occasionally revealed surprising effects: Participants responded slower for congruent compared to incongruent primes. This negative congruency effect (NCE) was ascribed to inhibition of prime-induced activation [Eimer, M., & Schlaghecken, F. (2003). Response faciliation and inhibition in subliminal priming. Biological Psychology, 64, 7-26.] that sets in if the prime activation is sufficiently strong. The current study tests this assumption by implementing manipulations designed to vary the amount of prime-induced activation in three experiments. In Experiments 1 and 3, NCEs were observed despite reduced prime-induced activation. Experiment 2 revealed no NCE with at least similar prime strength. Thus, the amount of prime activation did not predict whether or not NCEs occurred. The findings are discussed with regard to the inhibition account and the recently proposed account of mask-induced activation [cf. Lleras, A., & Enns, J. T. (2004). Negative compatibility or object updating? A cautionary tale of mask-dependent priming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 475-493; Verleger, R., Jaskowski, P., Aydemir, A., van der Lubbe, R. H. J., & Groen, M. (2004). Qualitative differences between conscious and nonconscious processing? On inverse priming induced by masked arrows. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 494-515].

Adult↗

PubMed2006

Unconscious priming according to multiple S-R rules.

The present study investigated if unconscious primes can be processed according to different stimulus-response (S-R) rules simultaneously. Participants performed two different S-R rules, such as judging a digit as smaller or larger than five and judging a letter as vowel or consonant. These S-R rules were administered in random order and announced by a previously presented cue. Each target stimulus was preceded by subliminal primes which afforded a different or an identical response according to either the currently irrelevant or currently relevant S-R rule. In three experiments, we consistently found priming effects according to currently irrelevant S-R rules, even when primes for the relevant and irrelevant S-R rules were presented simultaneously. Thus, unconscious stimuli have the power to activate responses according to currently required and currently not required S-R rules concurrently. The results are in line with response activation accounts of subliminal priming and suggest that at least two routes may gain access on response processes simultaneously.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2006

See what you've done! Active touch affects the number of perceived visual objects.

Previous research has shown that visual perception is affected by sensory information from other modalities. For example, sound can alter the visual intensity or the number of visual objects perceived. However, when touch and vision are combined, vision normally dominates--a phenomenon known as visual capture. Here we report a cross-modal interaction between active touch and vision: The perceived number of brief visual events (flashes) is affected by the number of concurrently performed finger movements (keypresses). This sensorimotor illusion occurred despite little ambiguity in the visual stimuli themselves and depended on a close temporal proximity between movement execution and vision.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Unconscious manipulation of free choice in humans.

Previous research has shown that subliminally presented stimuli accelerate or delay responses afforded by supraliminally presented stimuli. Our experiments extend these findings by showing that unconscious stimuli even affect free choices between responses. Thus, actions that are phenomenally experienced as freely chosen are influenced without the actor becoming aware of the manipulation. However, the unconscious influence is limited to a response bias, as participants chose the primed response only in up to 60% of the trials. LRP data in free choice trials indicate that the prime was not ineffective in trials in which participants chose the non-primed response as then it delayed performance of the incongruently primed response.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Task switching: on the origin of response congruency effects.

When people frequently alternate between simple cognitive tasks, performance on stimuli which are assigned the same response in both tasks is typically faster and more accurate than on stimuli which require different responses for both tasks, thus indicating stimulus processing according to the stimulus-response (S-R) rules of the currently irrelevant task. It is currently under debate whether such response congruency effects are mediated by the activation of an abstract representation of the irrelevant task in working memory or by "direct" associations between specific stimuli and responses. We contrasted these views by manipulating concurrent memory load (Experiment 1) and the frequency of specific S-R associations (Experiment 2). While between-task response congruency effects were not affected by the amount of concurrent memory load, they were much stronger for stimuli that were processed frequently in the context of a competitor task. These findings are consistent with the idea that a large portion of the congruency effects stems from direct S-R associations and they do not support a sole mediation by task-set activation in working memory.

Adult↗

PubMed2003

Variable action effects: response control by context-specific effect anticipations.

The ideomotor principle (IMP) claims that bidirectional associations between actions and their contingent effects are acquired so that voluntary actions are accessed by the anticipation of intended effects. Until now, evidence for the IMP exists only for stable action-effect relations. The present paper explores whether the IMP also holds true for the initiation of actions for which no unconditional contingent action-effect relations exist. Participants responded with left and right key presses in two different contexts. They selected the responses according to the vertical (context A) or horizontal (context B) position of a target. Responses were followed by short/fast movements of the target in context A and comparatively long/slow movements in context B. Consequently, each response produced short and long effects equally often in both contexts. Nevertheless, RTs decreased in contexts with short effects and increased in contexts with long effects. Data confirm that action-effect associations were acquired context-specifically and that the same actions were accessed by different effect anticipations.

Adult↗

PubMed2003

Conscious control over the content of unconscious cognition.

Visual stimuli (primes) presented too briefly to be consciously identified can nevertheless affect responses to subsequent stimuli - an instance of unconscious cognition. There is a lively debate as to whether such priming effects originate from unconscious semantic processing of the primes or from reactivation of learned motor responses that conscious stimuli afford during preceding practice. In four experiments we demonstrate that unconscious stimuli owe their impact neither to automatic semantic categorization nor to memory traces of preceding stimulus-response episodes, but to their match with pre-specified cognitive action-trigger conditions. The intentional creation of such triggers allows actors to control the way unconscious stimuli bias their behaviour.

Adolescent↗