Abstract
When people see a snake, they are likely to activate both affective information (e.g., dangerous) and non-affective information about its ontological category (e.g., animal). According to the Affective Primacy Hypothesis, the affective information has priority, and its activation can precede identification of the ontological category of a stimulus. Alternatively, according to the Cognitive Primacy Hypothesis, perceivers must know what they are looking at before they can make an affective judgment about it. We propose that neither hypothesis holds at all times. Here we show that the relative speed with which affective and non-affective information gets activated by pictures and words depends upon the contexts in which stimuli are processed. Results illustrate that the question of whether affective information has processing priority over ontological information (or vice versa) is ill-posed. Rather than seeking to resolve the debate over Cognitive vs. Affective Primacy in favor of one hypothesis or the other, a more productive goal may be to determine the factors that cause affective information to have processing priority in some circumstances and ontological information in others. Our findings support a view of the mind according to which words and pictures activate different neurocognitive representations every time they are processed, the specifics of which are co-determined by the stimuli themselves and the contexts in which they occur.
Highlights
If a person is hiking in a jungle and encounters an unknown creature, affective information associated with the creature might demand immediate evaluation
Since the effect of context cannot be explained away by superficial similarities between distractor and target judgments, we suggest that the biasing context influenced RTs by orienting participants toward the relevant dimension of the target stimulus, consistent with the orienting effects found in previous Task Set Inertia” (TSI) experiments (Allport and Wylie, 2000; Brookshire et al, 2010)
In two experiments we show that the context in which stimuli are processed can determine the relative speed with which people make affective and non-affective judgments on pictures and words
Summary
If a person is hiking in a jungle and encounters an unknown creature, affective information associated with the creature might demand immediate evaluation (e.g., is it safe or dangerous?). According to the Affective Primacy Hypothesis (Zajonc, 1980, 2000; LeDoux, 1996), information relevant for affective responses can be activated quickly and automatically, before information about ontological kinds. By contrast, according to the Cognitive Primacy Hypothesis (Lazarus, 1984; Storbeck et al, 2006) perceivers must determine the ontological category of a stimulus before they can evaluate its affective content. The stimuli themselves should not fully determine the relative primacy with which affective and cognitive/non-affective information gets activated, nor should the judgments that people make on the stimuli. The relative speed with which affective and non-affective information gets activated should depend on the context in which stimuli are processed, even when the stimuli themselves and the judgments people make on them are held constant
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