Measuring awareness in implicit cognition research: Developing research methods for the next decade.

A consensus among researchers is that much of our behaviour is based on rather automatic processes we are barely aware of and over which we have little control. Research suggests that exposure to subtle cues can have dramatic effects on our decisions. For instance, asking people to provide the last 2 digits of their social security number biases how much they are willing to pay for products and commodities. Similarly, according to some researchers, people are more likely to be impolite and disrespectful if they have been exposed to words related to rudeness while solving anagrams. Another line of research suggests that we take many of our (important) decisions when distracted and thinking about other things and that this 'unconscious thought' process actually improves the quality of our decisions.

These studies pertain to a larger area of research usually called 'implicit cognition', which explores how unconscious mechanisms contribute to cognitive processes including perception, learning, memory, and decision making. This area of research has attracted a great deal of attention from the media and features frequently in popular science books, blogs, and documentaries. Some authors have even suggested that parts of this research could be used to improve our decisions in different domains at a societal level (for example, in health behaviour and pension planning).

The present project focuses on a particular domain of this literature, implicit learning. Studies conducted in this area try to determine whether we are able to detect regularities in our environment without awareness of those regularities. In other words, these studies address whether we can learn something without realising that we are indeed learning it. In recent years there have been thousands of demonstrations of implicit learning effects in the scientific literature and, not surprisingly, this literature has become increasingly influential in all areas of psychology, with an important impact in our understanding of human cognition and psychopathology.

Unfortunately, our previous research suggests that much of this evidence is undermined by fundamental methodological problems that preclude any strong conclusions about the reliability of unconscious learning effects. We have shown that many of these studies find unconscious learning because researchers use weaker methods to assess whether people are conscious of what they have learned than to assess whether learning has taken place. Naturally, this implies that learning is easily detected but awareness is not, which creates the illusion that learning has taken place unconsciously. Finding evidence of awareness in these domains is important because it suggests that some degree of control may be available as well.

In the present project we propose new methods for the study of unconscious learning. Many of the problems that we have detected in our previous research can be ameliorated by employing cutting-edge statistical analysis, including Bayesian and meta-analytic methods and model fitting. However, the validity of these approaches in the domain of implicit cognition remains untested. A second goal is to conduct a large-scale exploration of the prevalence and magnitude of these problems. Our previous studies have focused on a very particular effect studied in implicit learning research ('contextual cueing'). We suspect that many of these problems transcend this domain and affect a large proportion of current studies on implicit learning. The potential impact of this assessment is difficult to overestimate. Finally, we will set up a collaboration with other international laboratories working on this topic to gather the largest and most sensitive data set of implicit learning effects available so far. This data set will be publicly available for all researchers, which will make it a fundamental resource for the study of unconscious cognitive processes for many years to come.

This research explores the extent to which fundamental psychological processes (e.g., perception, learning, memory and cognition) can take place outside awareness. Its key contribution is to enhance our understanding of human cognition, via the development and testing of new methods for measuring and assessing awareness. These methods can be adopted by other researchers in their own applications. Although the primary impact is likely to be academic in nature, there is significant potential for the project to have broader societal impact across a range of communities, as detailed below.

Public
We will construct a project website with information about the project's background, aims, and findings, and this will be accessible to the general public. The website will be highlighted via institutional and other relevant web pages. A series of public lectures is planned to engage and inform the general public on topics directly related to the project. These include UCL's Lunch Hour Lecture series, available on YouTube and regularly receiving >1000 views, as well as to audiences engaged by British Psychological Society outreach events. One aim will be to increase public awareness about the difficulty of assessing claims about unconscious mental processes (e.g., regarding 'nudging') and how advanced research methods can contribute to evaluating these claims. Another will be to raise public awareness about meta-science issues such as publication bias and how meta-analysis can permit weak effects to be detected even when individual studies falsely fail to detect them.

Practitioners
Implicit learning research has attracted the attention of many developmental and clinical psychologists as well as neurologists and neuropsychologists. Research conducted in our own laboratories has contributed to understanding how contextual cueing and other memory processes are affected by ageing. We will make links with this potential clinical relevance of our modeling work in the publications and conference presentations that result from our project. This research has impact potential for the public policy community. Much current interest on 'nudging' and behaviour change techniques is inspired by research on implicit cognition. This research underpins large-scale interventions aimed at improving health and social decisions (Halpern, 2015). The methodological approaches we will test could have a direct impact on this type of applied research by providing policy makers with the necessary tools to make a more nuanced assessment of psychological, economic and social research before these findings are translated to social interventions.

Academics in Other Fields
The Bayesian, meta-analytic and formal modelling tools developed in this project will be relevant to researchers in other fields, including not only experimental psychologists, but also clinical psychologists, neuroscientists, and social and personality psychologists interested in implicit processes. Based on our previous experience with the introduction of modeling techniques in other areas where they were relatively infrequent (Berry et al., 2012; Shanks & Berry, 2012), they will gather the attention of many researchers that have used these tasks. We also expect that our research will be relevant to experts in research methods (e.g., meta-analysis, Bayesian statistics), bearing in mind that implicit cognition provides an excellent arena for the evaluation and dissemination of new techniques.

Project Staff
The project will also contribute to the development of the cross-transferable skills-base of the PI and co-Is working on the project. They will receive additional advanced training in mathematical and statistical modeling, tools used in a variety of domains and industries - from the civil service to the private sector - to understand and predict behaviour, allowing them to build upon the foundations that were successfully laid in previous ESRC funded research.