It's difficult to look at pictures of cars shown on a computer and then keep yourself from saying "car" inside your head the next time one shows up on the screen -- even when someone tells you to avoid saying it. Now, a new study led by San Francisco State University researcher Ezequiel Morsella concludes that this same automatic effect can occur with much more complicated mental manipulations -- for instance, transforming "car" to the pig latin "ar-cay" in your head after you've been told to avoid that transformation.
This surprising effect offers further evidence that the contents of our consciousness -- the state of being awake and aware of our surroundings -- are often generated involuntarily, said Morsella, an assistant professor of psychology. In fact, the study published in the journal Acta Psychologica provides the first demonstration that even a small amount of training can cause unintentional, high-level symbol manipulation.
"Symbol manipulations such as mentally rotating an object in space, rearranging words or musical notes, or performing math operations -- these processes have been regarded as being more multifaceted, and as having more moving parts, in a sense, than the very different process of automatic memory retrieval," Morsella explained. "Our study reveals that unintentional, unconscious processes can be more sophisticated than what has been thought before."
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