TASK EFFECTS ON THE SPONTANEOUS ACTIVATION OF TRAIT CONCEPTS

The present study examined whether readers' processing goals affect the spontaneous generation of dispositional trait inferences. In Experiment 1, a constrained word stem completion task was used to detect trait activation when subjects read paragraphs that described the actions of a central character. Subjects were oriented to one of four processing goals: verbatim recall, factual recall, general elaborative recall, or impression formation. Evidence for the spontaneous activation of trait inferences was found only when processing demands required some form of elaborative processing (general elaboration and impression formation). In Experiment 2, we tested whether implicit memory tasks such as word stem and word fragment completion actually measure on-line concept activation, as we and other investigators have assumed. We found that both the word stem completion task and a word fragment completion task are sensitive to which concepts are activated during sentence comprehension. However, the word stem task was superior to the fragment task in detecting priming. Overall, the results support a multi-stage view of dispositional inferences.