The Processing Of Unconscious Thought On Thematic Relations Information

In traditional view,when faced with various decisions,thinking hard can get a good answer.However,recent studies found that unconscious thought was better than conscious thought at some problems.Subsequently,researchers have found the advantage of unconscious thought over conscious thought in other fields,such as clinical diagnosis,personnel selection,lie identification,moral judgment,creativity and so on.Based on this,Unconscious Thought Theory was proposed by Dijksterhuis and Nordgren.Unconscious thought has broken the traditional view that “hard thinking leads to good result”,and has become the hot topics in the field of social cognition.One of the core principles of Unconscious Thought Theory is bottom-up processing.This principle holds that unconscious thought will classify and sort out information according to the similarity relations between the information.However,due to the limitation of experimental materials,previous studies classified information into different objects according to taxonomic relations.Studies have shown that compared with taxonomic relations,thematic relations are closely related to the solution of creative problems,decision,induction and reasoning.Studies have shown that conscious thought is helpful to find taxonomic relations.Therefore,the paradigm of unconscious thought was used to investigate whether unconscious thought can detect thematic relations.In Experiment 1,word materials were used to manipulate thematic relations and taxonomic relations.In the experiment,participants were presented with three groups of words related to the bus.One group of words shared thematic relations with bus,one group of words shared taxonomic relations with bus,and another group of words is in the middle.All the participants are asked to select which group of words is more similarity to the bus.The results showed that,compared with conscious thought group,unconscious thought group was more likely to choose the group of words with thematic relations.In order to exclude the online judgments forming in the information presentation,Experiment 2 added immediate decision group based on Experiment 1.The results showed that the number of participants in unconscious thought who selected thematic relations were higher than that in conscious thought group and immediate decision group.In Experiment 3,Navon large letter and small letter task were used to compare the influence on the unconscious thought effect,and further examines whether unconscious thought can detect thematic relations.The results showed that compared with conscious thought group and Navon small letter group,participants in Navon large letter group were conductive to selecting the group of words with thematic relations.Based on all three experiments,this study shows that unconscious thought can detect thematic relations.