It’s hard to view a picture of a car on a screen and not silently say the word “car” to yourself—even when you’ve been told not to. A new study led by San Francisco State University researcher Ezequiel Morsella shows that the same kind of automatic response can occur for far more complex mental operations. In the experiment, participants were trained to convert words into Pig Latin (for example, turning “car” into “ar-cay”) and then instructed not to perform that transformation; despite these instructions, many people generated the Pig Latin form involuntarily.
The findings, published in the journal Acta Psychologica, add to growing evidence that much of what fills our conscious awareness is produced without deliberate intent. According to Morsella, an assistant professor of psychology, this study is the first to demonstrate that even brief training can trigger unintentional, high-level symbol manipulation that reaches consciousness.
“Processes such as mentally rotating objects in space, rearranging words or musical notes, or performing arithmetic have long been seen as complex, multi-step operations—distinct from simple automatic memory retrieval,” Morsella said. “Our results show that unintentional, unconscious mechanisms can generate surprisingly sophisticated operations.”
In the experiment, 32 undergraduate students were taught or reminded how to perform Pig Latin on simple words (moving the initial consonant to the end and adding “ay”). During a computerized test, participants were explicitly told not to carry out that mental transformation. If they found they had performed the transformation despite the instruction, they were to press the spacebar to report the involuntary event.
Even though they were actively trying to suppress the transformation, participants reported involuntary Pig Latin conversions on 43 percent of trials. “These people were trying hard not to have the effect occur, so this high-level process was running counter to the subjects’ conscious intentions,” Morsella explained.
The researchers also ran the task on themselves and were surprised by how often they failed to prevent the transformation from occurring in awareness. The robustness of the effect led Morsella and colleagues to argue that conscious contents can be generated by unconscious processes that are more elaborate than commonly assumed.
Morsella and his team link these results to the passive frame theory they proposed previously. The theory posits that consciousness functions more like a channel or interface for information rather than an active generator of content. Consciousness, on this view, provides a unified workspace where information produced by various unconscious systems is made available, but it does not itself carry out the complex processing that generates that information.
“Consciousness is like an interpreter or a network: it’s necessary to communicate and coordinate complex activity, but it is not the primary engine that produces the content,” Morsella said. “By itself, consciousness—like a window—doesn’t do much, but it provides an essential platform for other, more active unconscious systems.”
The study’s outcome has implications beyond theory. Morsella pointed out that understanding how sophisticated unconscious processing can be may help clinicians devise better strategies for treating intrusive thoughts, obsessive rumination, and compulsive behaviors. Many therapeutic techniques teach patients to recognize and manage urges once those urges enter awareness. The new findings suggest that in some cases it may be more effective to retrain responses so that problematic urges never reach conscious awareness, because once an urge is conscious it is already at a relatively advanced and powerful stage of processing.
Source: San Francisco State University
Image Credit: Public domain image used for illustration.
Original Research: Cho, H., Zarolia, P., Gazzaley, A., & Morsella, E., “Involuntary symbol manipulation (Pig Latin) from external control: Implications for thought suppression,” Acta Psychologica. Published online April 1, 2016. DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2016.03.004
Abstract
Involuntary symbol manipulation (Pig Latin) from external control: Implications for thought suppression
Ironic processing research shows that people are more likely to think about something (for example, white bears) when instructed not to think about it. Such involuntary entry into consciousness may reflect the encapsulated nature of the mechanisms that generate conscious content. The Reflexive Imagery Task (RIT) demonstrates that once an action set is activated, conscious contents can arise involuntarily and systematically in response to external stimuli. In the basic RIT, participants view objects and are instructed not to think of their names—a task that proves difficult. A key criticism has been that the RIT effect may only apply to simple automatic processes (such as cued memory retrieval) and not to more complex symbol manipulations that involve frontal cortex processes. To test this, participants were trained to perform a word-manipulation task akin to Pig Latin (e.g., “CAR” → “AR-CAY”) and then instructed not to perform that transformation. The RIT effect persisted, showing that involuntary, high-level symbol manipulation can be triggered externally. These findings bear on theories of cognitive control, psychopathology, and conscious versus unconscious processing.
Cho, H., Zarolia, P., Gazzaley, A., & Morsella, E., “Involuntary symbol manipulation (Pig Latin) from external control: Implications for thought suppression,” Acta Psychologica. Published online April 1, 2016. DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2016.03.004