Measures Of Implicit Cognition Research Articles

The IRAP as a Measure of Implicit Cognition: A Case of Frankenstein's Monster.

The implicit relational assessment procedure (IRAP) was initially developed as a way to assess the strength and probability of natural verbal relations, as defined within relational frame theory (RFT), and was conceptually rooted within the behavior-analytic tradition. However, the IRAP quickly became employed primarily as a measure of implicit cognition, more in line with mainstream psychology than behavior analysis. In doing so, research using the IRAP increasingly employed ill-defined mainstream psychological terms, focused on correlational analyses with traditional psychometry, and thus emphasized prediction over the prediction-and-influence of behavior. Although perhaps beneficial to the study of implicit cognition, this approach could be argued to have limited the IRAP's utility in behavior analyses of human language and cognition. In the current article we will reflect on this suggestion, on the IRAPs place and current use in the field of behavior analysis, and on its potential future within behavioral psychology in light of recent conceptual and empirical advances in RFT. In doing so, it is hoped that the measure may be refined into a better understood, more precise, functional-analytic tool.

Changes in Drug-Related Implicit Associations during Substance Use Disorder Treatment: The Role of the Therapeutic Context

ABSTRACT Background Implicit cognition has been linked to relapse in substance use disorder (SUD). Studies on attentional bias have found different outcomes related to the therapeutic context, finding an association with relapse in inpatients but not in outpatients. There are no similar studies that use associations in semantic memory as a measure of implicit cognition. Objectives (i) to analyze the relationship between a measure of associations in semantic memory and relapse in inpatients and outpatients; (ii) to compare the evolution of these associations between inpatients and outpatients after 3 months of treatment. Methods Eighty nine outpatients and 94 inpatients with SUD for cocaine and alcohol participated in this study. We employed a longitudinal design with a baseline evaluation and follow-up after three months, using the Word Association Task for Drug Use Disorder (WAT-DUD). Results The choice of drug-related words predicted relapse in cocaine (odds ratio = 1.97, z = 2.01, p = .045) and alcohol-cocaine (odds ratio = 2.39, z = 2.55, p = .011) use. Follow-up at 3 months revealed a reduction in the choice of drug-related words in inpatients (Z = 2.031, p = .042). Conclusions A greater choice of drug-associated words in the presence of ambiguous images was related to relapse in inpatients but not in outpatients. The inpatients group showed a reduction in the semantic association with drugs during the first three months of treatment.

Implicit Measures of Receptive Vocabulary Knowledge in Individuals With Level 3 Autism

Implicit measures of cognition are essential for assessing knowledge in people with Level 3 autism because such individuals are often unable to make reliable overt behavioral responses. In this study, we investigated whether three implicit measures-eye movement (EM) monitoring, pupillary dilation (PD), and event-related potentials (ERPs)-can be used to reliably estimate vocabulary knowledge in individuals with Level 3 autism. Five adults with Level 3 autism were tested in a repeated-measures design with two tasks. High-frequency 'known' words (eg, bus, airplane) and low-frequency 'unknown' words (eg, ackee, cherimoya) were presented in a visual world task (during which EM and PD data were collected) and a picture-word congruity task (during which ERP data were collected). Using a case-study approach with single-subject analyses, we found that these implicit measures have the potential to provide estimates of receptive vocabulary knowledge in individuals with Level 3 autism. Participants differed with respect to which measures were the most sensitive and which variables best predicted vocabulary knowledge. These implicit measures may be useful to assess language abilities in individuals with Level 3 autism, but their use should be tailored to each individual.

Measures of Implicit Cognition for Marketing Research

Academics and managers need to know that key mental processes occur below the conscious awareness threshold. While unconscious processes largely influence consumer decision-making processes, self-report measures do not reveal these processes adequately. Consequently, marketers need to utilise psychologists’ indirect measures that infer unconscious mental content from reaction-time tasks. Three well-known tools are explicated in the present article: the Emotional Stroop Task, the Implicit Association Test (IAT), and the Approach-Avoidance Task (AAT). Each test taps into a different facet of implicit cognition. This research describes these test instruments’ experimental setups and alternative procedures to guide academics and practitioners when they apply implicit measures. The Ask Your Brain (AYB) survey software is presented as an online research platform for executing all three test types and provides a cost-efficient alternative to lab experiments. In this paper’s conceptual part, we outline the three test instruments’ research paradigms and describe their past applications in the marketing domain. We describe each implicit measurement instrument’s conceptual background, summarize its standard test procedures, and briefly discuss relevant methodological criticisms. We describe how the obtained measurement data should be prepared, condensed, and analysed. Subsequently, we present an empirical case to illustrate the concrete application of the different measurement instruments, utilising empirical data gained from a consumer protection study of 104 South African students. These young adults were confronted with alcohol stimuli in the Emotional Stroop Task, IAT, and AAT. They subsequently performed a discrete choice task related to alcoholic drinks and soft drinks. Based on their drink choices, we explore the extent to which the implicit measures relate to their choice behaviour. The Emotional Stroop Task is based on the premise that emotional stimuli attract more visual attention than neutral stimuli. This distraction causes a delay in response when participants are asked to name a displayed word's colour as fast as possible. Although our study could not directly support this premise, alcohol-inclined participants generally reacted more slowly to alcohol and neutral stimuli. The IAT confronts participants with combinations of a bipolar target category and a bipolar attribute category. Category combinations corresponding to the respondent's intuition (compatible) facilitate task performance and result in shorter reaction times. In our study, those individuals who chose significantly more drinks containing alcohol reacted faster to combinations of “alcohol” and “active” (rather than “alcohol” and “miserable”). This finding shows that the IAT can indeed predict choice behaviour. Finally, the AAT postulates that individuals move faster to a desired object and away from an undesired object. Both the reaction times and the error rates indicated this pattern. Individuals were slower and produced more errors during incongruent tasks (push positive items; pull negative items) than congruent tasks (pull liked items, push disliked items). This finding show that implicit measures can identify consumers´ approach and avoidance tendencies. This paper provides methodological insights into three prominent implicit cognition measures, as well as practical suggestions for practitioners and academics. We exemplify each method’s usage for research questions in marketing and consumer research. We particularly suggest using the Emotional Stroop Task for studies on attention-based processes, for example, advertisement exposure. The IAT is recommended for assessing richer cognitive processes, such as product or brand images, and the AAT when studying visceral and biological influences on impulsive consumption. Overall, we encourage marketing researchers to add implicit measures to their toolbox and to explore their contributions further for a better understanding of consumer decision making.

Exploring the Single-Trial-Type-Dominance-Effect in the IRAP: Developing a Differential Arbitrarily Applicable Relational Responding Effects (DAARRE) Model

The Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) has been used as a measure of implicit cognition and has been used to analyze the dynamics of arbitrarily applicable relational responding. The current study uses the IRAP for the latter purpose. Specifically, the current research focuses on a pattern of responding observed in a previously published IRAP study that was difficult to explain using existing conceptual analyses. The pattern is referred to as the single-trial-type dominance effect because one of the IRAP trial types produces an effect that is significantly larger than that of the other three. Based on a post hoc explanation provided in a previously published article, the first experiment in the current series explored the impact of prior experimental experience on the single-trial-type dominance effect. The results indicated that the effect was larger for participants who reported high levels of experimental experience (M = 32.3 previous experiments) versus those who did not (M = 2.5 previous experiments). In the second experiment, participants were required to read out loud the stimuli presented on each trial and the response option they chose. The effect of experimental experience was absent, but the single-trial-type dominance effect remained. In the third experiment, a different set of stimuli than those used in the first two experiments was used in the IRAP, and a significant single-trial-type dominance effect was no longer observed. The results obtained from the three experiments led inductively to the development of a new model of the variables involved in producing IRAP effects—the differential arbitrarily applicable relational responding effects (DAARRE) model—which is presented in the General Discussion.

Methylphenidate enhances implicit learning in healthy adults.

One limiting factor in the development of pharmacological interventions to enhance cognition is the absence of biomarkers that can be used in healthy volunteers to screen novel compounds. Drug discovery has tended to rely heavily on explicit measures of cognition, but these are typically insensitive to cognition-enhancing effects in healthy volunteers. This study investigated whether a novel battery of implicit cognition measures is sensitive to the effects of methylphenidate (Ritalin) in healthy volunteers. Eighty healthy volunteers were randomised to receive either a single (10 mg) dose of methylphenidate or matched placebo. Participants completed a battery of tasks measuring implicit cognition (location priming, contextual cueing, implicit task switching). The effect of methylphenidate on standard, explicit measures of cognition was also assessed. Methylphenidate enhanced implicit learning on the location priming task and the implicit task-switching task. In line with previous work, we found that these effects were greater in male volunteers. There was no evidence for improved learning in any of the explicit measures. These results demonstrate that implicit measures of cognition are sensitive to pharmacological interventions in healthy volunteers. As such, implicit cognition measures may be a useful way of screening and tracking cognitive effects of novel agents in experimental medicine studies.

Honest politics: Evaluating candidate perceptions for the 2012 U. S. election with the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure

Mainstream implicit cognition measures such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT) have produced a substantial volume of data on political attitudes. However, the associative basis of most implicit measures entail interpretive limitations that may be avoided with a relatively new measure known as the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP). The IRAP is a measure of arbitrarily applicable relational repertoires based on a functional and contextual view of cognition. The current study used the IRAP to assess relational repertoires among college undergraduates in respect to images of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney presented in conjunction with positive and negative evaluative words. The results showed distinct patterns of bias on the IRAP that correlated with various political self-reports. The IRAP also distinguished self-reported intentions to vote for Obama or Romney. Some of the results revealed patterns that would not be apparent with a comparable IAT. The current study provides a supportive basis for the reliability and convergent validity of the IRAP for measuring implicit perceptions of political candidates.

Psychopathology, Anxiety or Attentional Control: Determining the Variables Which Predict IRAP Performance

Background & Objectives The Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) is a widely used measure of implicit cognition which has detected biases pertaining to various psychological constructs from spider fear to cocaine dependence. One issue which emerges in the IRAP literature is that of participants failing to meet or uphold the necessary criteria to complete the IRAP, which results in their elimination from the study, which can be rather detrimental to results. The present study sought to delineate which factors may contribute to high attrition rates in IRAP research.

Assessment of self-harm risk using implicit thoughts.

Assessing for the risk of self-harm in acute care is a difficult task, and more information on pertinent risk factors is needed to inform clinical practice. This study examined the relationship of 6 forms of implicit cognition about death, suicide, and self-harm with the occurrence of self-harm in the future. We then attempted to develop a model using these measures of implicit cognition along with other psychometric tests and clinical risk factors. We conducted a prospective cohort of 107 patients (age > 17 years) with a baseline assessment that included 6 implicit association tests that assessed thoughts of death, suicide, and self-harm. Psychometric questionnaires were also completed by the patients, and these included the Beck Hopelessness Scale (Beck, Weissman, Lester, & Trexler, 1974), Barratt impulsiveness scale (Patton, Stanford, & Barratt, 1995), brief symptom inventory (Derogatis & Melisaratos, 1983), CAGE questionnaire for alcoholism (Ewing, 1984), and the drug abuse screening test 10 (Skinner, 1982). Medical and demographic information was also obtained for patients as potential confounders or useful covariables. The outcome measure was the occurrence of self-harm within 3 months. Implicit associations with death versus life as a predictor added significantly (odds ratio = 5.1, 95% confidence interval [1.3, 20.3]) to a multivariable model. The model had 96.6% sensitivity and 53.9% specificity with a high cutoff, or 58.6% sensitivity and 96.2% specificity with a low cutoff. This scale shows promise for screening emergency department patients with mental health presentations who may be at risk for future self-harm or suicide.

Implicit measurement of positive and negative future thinking as a predictor of depressive symptoms and hopelessness

Research using explicit measures has linked decreased positive future thinking, but not increased negative future thinking, with clinical depression. However, individuals may be unable or unwilling to express thoughts about the future, and can be unaware of implicit beliefs that can influence their behavior. Implicit measures of cognition may shed light on the role of future thinking in depression. To our knowledge, the current study presents the first implicit measure of positive and negative future thinking. A sample of 71 volunteers (38 healthy; 33 with sub-clinical depression) completed both implicit and explicit measures of positive and negative future thinking. The findings indicate differences in the evaluation of both positive and negative future events between the two groups. However, group differences were more pronounced on the implicit measure. These findings point to the potential utility of an implicit measure of future thinking in mental health research and clinical practice.

Developing an implicit measure of disgust propensity and disgust sensitivity: Examining the role of implicit disgust propensity and sensitivity in obsessive-compulsive tendencies

Background and objectivesThere is increasing evidence that disgust responding occurs at both a primary and secondary level in the form of disgust propensity and disgust sensitivity. The unique contributions of anxiety and disgust need to be established if disgust is to be implicated in the etiology of anxiety disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The primary objective of the current study was to develop two separate implicit measures of disgust propensity and sensitivity and to explicate the role of implicit disgust propensity and sensitivity in avoidance behavior and OC tendencies. MethodsThe current study (N = 33 undergraduate students) utilized a measure of implicit cognition, the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP), to independently analyze disgust propensity and disgust sensitivity. In addition, a series of behavioral approach tasks (BAT) and questionnaires measuring general disgust, obsessive-compulsive (OC) tendencies and general psychopathology were implemented to validate the implicit measures. ResultsDisgust sensitivity predicted avoidance behavior on the BATs independent of disgust propensity and anxiety, while disgust propensity did not. Both disgust propensity and sensitivity predicted self-reported OC tendencies and individually predicted obsessing and washing concerns, respectively. LimitationsOur findings are based on a non-clinical student sample and further research is required for generalization to OCD. ConclusionsThe implicit measures appeared to be measuring two separate constructs and had differential relationships with behavior and OC tendencies. Overall, the results support current theories relating to pathological disgust and OCD.

The Cultural Context of Cognition: What the Implicit Association Test Tells Us About How Culture Works1

This article employs evidence from a literature within social psychology on the malleability of scores on the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a measure that is widely used to assess implicit attitudes, and other implicit cognition measures, to provide a theoretical framework for incorporating implicit processes into sociological accounts of culture. Studies from this literature demonstrate the fundamentally contextual and interactional nature of implicit cognition; that is, how the cultural environment shapes the activation of cognitive associations. Understanding how culture works to influence behavior requires attention to the interaction between the cultural environment—including symbols and media, place, situations, and networks—and cognitive representations. Using this theoretical framework, I discuss how evidence from the sociology of culture regarding the nature of this cultural environment can inform our understanding of culture in action.

Introduction to the special issue: Implicit measures of consumer response—the search for the Holy Grail of marketing research

AbstractThe advent of measures of implicit cognition provides marketing researchers with tools they can use to probe automatic processes that do not rely on conscious deliberation. Attempts by marketing researchers to probe unconscious or automatic processes underlying consumer attitudes and purchase decisions date back at least as far as the work of motivation researchers in the early to mid‐twentieth century. These newer methods, principally the Implicit Association Test, emerged from work of psychologists concerned with studying implicit attitudes toward the self and social issues. These measures have more recently been applied to marketing studies of implicit attitudes of consumers toward particular brands and products. This special issue of Psychology & Marketing features contributions in which contemporary researchers in the field review applications of implicit measurement to consumer cognition, consumer persuasion, and nonverbal communication in the retailing context. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Cognitive‐behavioural rehabilitation of high‐risk violent offenders: Investigating treatment change with explicit and implicit measures of cognition

AbstractImportant as it is both to risk of re‐offending and to cognitive behavioural treatment, violent cognition is seldom measured in rehabilitation programmes, and even more rarely linked to measures of violence risk. Most often, researchers measure violent cognition by having offenders complete transparent self‐report questionnaires. This approach may be flawed both by socially desirable responding and by theoretical speculation that stronger links exist between automatic rather than explicit, consciously deliberated cognition and violent behaviour. We measured violent cognition in several ways; collecting data with two self‐report scales, along with two Implicit Association Tests (IATs) from men commencing and completing an intensive cognitive‐behavioural rehabilitation programme for high‐risk violent prisoners. We addressed the questions of whether these two forms of assessment—explicit and implicit—are related, and which is most strongly linked to estimates of violence, based on the Violence Risk Scale. Explicit and implicit tests were not related to each other, although both self‐report scales, and one of the IATs elicited significantly more pro‐social responses following treatment. Further, the Aggression Questionnaire (AQ) scores were significantly correlated with dynamic risk both pre‐ and post‐programme, while post‐programme, scores on one of the two IATs was significantly correlated with dynamic and static risk, as measured pre‐ and post‐programme. These findings suggest that implicit and explicit measures may be assessing different aspects of cognition, and only some are related to violence risk. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Measuring the Suicidal Mind

Suicide is difficult to predict and prevent because people who consider killing themselves often are unwilling or unable to report their intentions. Advances in the measurement of implicit cognition provide an opportunity to test whether automatic associations of self with death can provide a behavioral marker for suicide risk. We measured implicit associations about death/suicide in 157 people seeking treatment at a psychiatric emergency department. Results confirmed that people who have attempted suicide hold a significantly stronger implicit association between death/suicide and self than do psychiatrically distressed individuals who have not attempted suicide. Moreover, the implicit association of death/suicide with self was associated with an approximately 6-fold increase in the odds of making a suicide attempt in the next 6 months, exceeding the predictive validity of known risk factors (e.g., depression, suicide-attempt history) and both patients’ and clinicians’ predictions. These results provide the first evidence of a behavioral marker for suicidal behavior and suggest that measures of implicit cognition may be useful for detecting and predicting sensitive clinical behaviors that are unlikely to be reported.

Creating an implicit measure of cognition more suited to applied research: A test of the Mixed Trial—Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (MT-IRAP).

Implicit cognition measures such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, &, Schwartz, 1998) have become increasingly common in many areas including research on prejudice, consumer preferences, political attitudes, psychopathology, and personality traits (Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhlmann, & Banaji, 2009), in part to avoid the problems of self- report such as susceptibility to self -presentation biases and introspective limits (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). Implicit measures provide important additional information to explicit assessments, particularly in domains heavily affected by social desirability (Greenwald et al., 2009) or with automatic and spontaneous behaviors (e.g., Asendorpf, Banse, & Mucke, 2002). These measures have not become common in clinical settings, however, due to their procedural characteristics. The IAT, currently the most popular method, relies on the finding that individuals are generally faster at sorting stimuli based on two concepts to the same response key when these concepts are associated than when they are not. For example, an individual may be faster at sorting words related to flower and good to the same key than at sorting words related to flower and bad to the same key. There are hundreds of studies on the IAT (Greenwald et al., 2009), but it only assesses the relative strength of target concepts (De Houwer, 2002), which greatly limits its applied use. For example, if the IAT shows faster responding with flower-good/insect-bad trials than flower-bad/insect-good trials, it is unclear whether the effect is due to a flower-good association, insect-bad association or some relative contribution of both. The IAT design also limits its applicability to domains that go beyond simple associations and bipolar categories, which is often the case with the kinds of beliefs and attitudes applied issues present. Researchers have been working on a variety of alternative IAT designs (e.g., Cohen, Beck, Brown, & Najolia, 2010; Karpinski & Steinman, 2006; Nosek & Banaji, 2001), but none yet overcome these problems. Relational Frame Theory (RFT; Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, & Roche, 2001) researchers have developed an alternative measure, the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP; Barnes-Holmes et al., 2006). Participants are asked to select a relation (e.g., similar/different) between a target stimulus (e.g., substance user words) and a label stimulus (i.e., good/bad) in a series of trials. Two types of trial blocks are used, one in which the verbal relations are consistent with the participants' history of relating stimuli (e.g., addict is similar to bad) and the other where the responses are inconsistent (e.g., addict is similar to good). Participants are trained to emit these two opposing types of sorts (i.e., consistent and inconsistent responses) through an alternating series of practice trials. The difference in response latency between consistent and inconsistent trial blocks in subsequent testing is used to detect the implicit effect. The IRAP is more flexible than the IAT, particularly as it can be used to examine specific implicit relations with a target concept, rather than only relative associations, and to assess a broad range of relations beyond associations. The IRAP demonstrates predicted differences between known groups in a wide variety of areas including some of applied relevance such as self-esteem (Scanlon, Barnes-Holmes, Barnes-Holmes, & Stewart, under review; Vahey, Barnes-Holmes, Barnes-Holmes, & Stewart, 2009), attitudes towards different nationalities (Power, Barnes-Holmes, Barnes-Holmes, & Stewart, 2009), and sexual attitudes (Dawson, Barnes-Holmes, Gresswell, Hart, & Gore, 2009) among many others. The IRAP diverges from explicit self- reports in predicted ways (Barnes-Holmes, Murphy, Barnes-Holmes, & Stewart, 2010; Power et al., 2009), and is sensitive to variables that go beyond explicit reports (Roddy, Stewart & Barnes-Holmes, 2010). …

Examining the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure: Four Preliminary Studies

The Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP, pronounced “I-rap”; Barnes-Holmes et al., 2006) has arrived only recently on the scene of implicit measures of cognition. These computerized tasks have been used most frequently to examine potential social biases that participants may prefer to hide or deny, such as racist or sexist patterns of thinking. In contrast to face-valid self-report measures, implicit measures like the IRAP appear to make deception more difficult. Furthermore, this means of assessment allows cognition researchers to assess for biases that may be outside of the participant’s awareness, such as those that are very subtle or occur very early in response to relevant stimuli. The general methodological strategy of the IRAP is similar to other computerized measures of implicit cognition, such as the Implicit Association

Prejudiced or Just Smart?

Implicit Association Tests (IATs) are well-known measures of implicit cognition, particularly attitudes. Previous studies reported that IATs are affected by method-specific variance: IAT effects of more intelligent people may appear smaller due to their reduced task-switch costs. In contrast, based on a theoretical framework that assumes IAT effects to depend on successful recoding of the congruent IAT task, larger IAT effects are expected for more intelligent people. We tested the hypothesis that intelligence can bias IAT effects with different IATs. General processing speed was also assessed. Two studies indicated faster and more intelligent participants to have larger IAT effects in some, but not all, IATs.