The Effects of Interdependent and Independent Priming on Western Participants’ Ability to Perceive Changes in Visual Scenes

Abstract

The current study examined whether priming interdependent relative to independent self-knowledge would induce different thinking styles among Western participants, and whether this would, in turn, affect the speed of detecting changes in a change-blindness task. Based on predictions from the semantic–procedural interface model, we predicted that participants would attend more to the context following an interdependent self-construal priming manipulation than following an independent self-construal priming manipulation. Sixty individuals were asked to circle the pronouns we/us/our or I/me/my in a paragraph of text. Following this, all participants were shown alternating images in a change-blindness task. Reaction times and accuracy rates at identifying focal and contextual changes were measured. Though our Western participants were faster at identifying changes in focal objects relative to contextual objects, this difference in reaction times was reduced in half for participants who were primed with interdependency (we/us/our pronoun circling) relative to independence (I/me/my pronoun circling). This result is consistent with the claim that interdependent and independent self-construals are stored in a semantic network which is connected to different procedural modes of thinking and that by priming these different views of the self, participants activate a mode of thinking that influences attention.