Individual construct accessibility and perceptual selection

The immediate environmental context in which social events occur and the current processing goals of the perceiver have been found to be important determinants of attentional focus, person memory, and social judgment. However, individuals may bring their own idiosyncratic perceptual sensitivities to bear on the selection of stimuli for further processing. The present experiment was designed to test whether one's chronically accessible social constructs constitute such a long-term perceptual readiness. The Stroop color-naming paradigm was employed to present trait-related adjectives to subjects who were to name the color in which each word was presented as quickly as possible. Subjects were paired according to the accessibility of their constructs for four different trait dimensions (so that one subject's accessible constructs were the other subject's inaccessible constructs, and vice versa). Analyses of color-naming latencies revealed that it took reliably longer for subjects to name the color of adjectives corresponding to their chronically accessible constructs than of those related to their inaccessible constructs. These results are consistent with a model in which stimulus properties relevant to one's accessible constructs receive preferential treatment in the initial automatic analysis of the environment.