Affective Primacy vs. Cognitive Primacy: Dissolving the Debate
نویسندگان
چکیده
When people see a snake, they are likely to activate both affective information (e.g., dangerous) and non-affective information about its ontological category (e.g., animal). According to the Affective Primacy Hypothesis, the affective information has priority, and its activation can precede identification of the ontological category of a stimulus. Alternatively, according to the Cognitive Primacy Hypothesis, perceivers must know what they are looking at before they can make an affective judgment about it. We propose that neither hypothesis holds at all times. Here we show that the relative speed with which affective and non-affective information gets activated by pictures and words depends upon the contexts in which stimuli are processed. Results illustrate that the question of whether affective information has processing priority over ontological information (or vice versa) is ill-posed. Rather than seeking to resolve the debate over Cognitive vs. Affective Primacy in favor of one hypothesis or the other, a more productive goal may be to determine the factors that cause affective information to have processing priority in some circumstances and ontological information in others. Our findings support a view of the mind according to which words and pictures activate different neurocognitive representations every time they are processed, the specifics of which are co-determined by the stimuli themselves and the contexts in which they occur.
منابع مشابه
Affective and Non-affective Meaning in Words and Pictures
When people see a snake, they are likely to activate both affective information (e.g., dangerous) and non-affective information (e.g., animal). According to the Affective Primacy Hypothesis, the affective information has priority, and its activation can precede identification of the ontological category of a stimulus. Alternatively, according to the Cognitive Primacy Hypothesis, perceivers must...
متن کاملAffective Primacy in Intraorganizational Task Networks
To better understand the causal role of affect in the formation of task-related networks in organizations, we develop a theory of affective primacy that identifies cognitive and motivational mechanisms through which the affective value of social interactions (a feeling of positive affect from interacting with a colleague) operates as a cause of instrumental value (a subjective evaluation of an ...
متن کاملAffect, cognition, and awareness: affective priming with optimal and suboptimal stimulus exposures.
The affective primacy hypothesis (R. B. Zajonc, 1980) asserts that positive and negative affective reactions can be evoked with minimal stimulus input and virtually no cognitive processing. The present work tested this hypothesis by comparing the effects of affective and cognitive priming under extremely brief (suboptimal) and longer (optimal) exposure durations. At suboptimal exposures only af...
متن کاملRelationship between Economic Growth, Urban Concentration and Trade: Evidence from the Asia-Pacific
There is a significant relationship between economic growth and the degree of urban concentration, as measured by primacy or the share of the largest city in an urban system. In accordance to urban economic theories, there is an inverse-U shape relationship between urban concentration âurban primacy- and economic growth. That is, as economy grows, urban concentration increases, approaches a...
متن کاملNeuronal correlates of serial position performance in amnestic mild cognitive impairment.
OBJECTIVES Delayed recall of the first words of a list-the primacy position-is thought to be particularly dependent on intact memory consolidation. Hippocampal volume has been suggested as the primary neuronal correlate of delayed primacy recall in cognitively normal elderly individuals. Here, we studied the association of hippocampal volume with primacy recall in individuals with amnestic mild...
متن کامل