Automatic Information Processing And Social Perception.

The construct of schemas, organized structures of conceptually-related information in memory, has stimulated a good deal of social psychological research in recent years. Yet most of this research has centered on the effects of schemas on memory; little is known about their role in selective attention and encoding processes. This is despite the importance of selective attention in determining the outcome of human judgments as well as the contents of memory. In order to be able to predict which sources of stimulation in a rich, complex environment will be processed by their corresponding schemas, it must first be known how much relevant external stimulation is needed to activate a dormant schema. Experiment 1 explored the minimal conditions needed to activate the schema for the self. The self-schema was chosen as the focus of the experiment because it is widely considered to be the most frequently used of all memory schemas. In general, the more frequently a schema is activated, the more efficient it becomes, requiring less and less conscious attention to process relevant information. Using the dichotic listening paradigm to present schema-relevant information outside of subjects' awareness, and the probe reaction time technique to measure the amount of processing this information was given, it was found that conscious awareness of the information was not necessary for it to be attended. The mere sensation of the relevant stimulation was all that was needed to activate the self-schema. Experiment 2 extended these results to the visual domain, and showed hostile information also to be capable of this automatic processing. Moreover, subjects exposed to a higher proportion of hostile information subsequently rated a stimulus person more negatively than subjects presented with lower proportions. Thus, self-relevant and hostile information was shown to be automatically processed; it was attended to and exerted an influence on conscious impression formation even though subjects were not aware of its presence. Implications of these findings for current models of social cognition, the role of schemas in social perception, and the conditions and time course of schema activation were discussed.PhDPsychologySocial psychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/127576/2/8125064.pd