The Role of Consciousness in Priming Effects on Categorization

Consciousness of a priming event at the time information about the event is retrieved from memory is argued to make a qualitative difference as to the consequences of the prime for subsequent social judgments. Two experiments are reported that provide evidence bearing on this hypothesis. Experiment 1 demonstrated that whether or not subjects can recall any of the priming stimuli presented in a first task dramatically influences which of two evaluatively dissimilar primed constructs they subsequently use in their categorizations of a target description. Subjects who could recall one or more primes showed contrast effects with regard to the more accessible construct, whereas subjects who could not recall any primes showed assimilation effects. Experiment 2 showed that interruption of the priming task resulted in assimilation effects for both the recall and the no-recall subjects. Together, these findings suggest that the function of consciousness of the priming events is to enable subjects to process subsequent information relevant to the primed constructs more flexibly. The results of both studies are discussed in terms of their relevance for theoretical distinctions between episodic and semantic memory and between automatic and controlled cognitive processing.