Investigating the Automaticity of Links Between Body Perception and Trait Concepts

Social cognition has been argued to rely on automatic mechanisms, but little is known about how automatically the processing of body shapes is linked to other social processes, such as trait inference. In three pre-registered experiments, we tested the automaticity of links between body shape perception and trait inference by manipulating cognitive load during a response- competition task. In Experiment 1 (N = 52), participants categorised body shapes in the context of compatible or incompatible trait words, under high and low cognitive load. Bayesian multi- level modelling of reaction times indicated that interference caused by the compatibility of trait cues was insensitive to concurrent demands placed on working memory resources. These findings indicate that the linking of body shapes and traits is resource-light and more “automatic” in this sense. In Experiment 2 (N = 39) and 3 (N = 70), we asked participants to categorise trait words in the context of task-irrelevant body shapes. Under these conditions, no evidence of interference was found, regardless of concurrent load. These results suggest that while body shapes and trait concepts can be linked in an automatic manner, such processes are sensitive to wider contextual factors, such as the order in which information is presented.

社会认知被认为依赖于自动机制，然而关于身体形态处理与其他社会过程（如特性推断）之间自动化的联系所知甚少。在三项预先注册的实验中，我们通过在反应竞争任务中操纵认知负荷来检验了身体形态感知与特性推断之间联系的自动化程度。在实验1（N = 52）中，参与者在高认知负荷和低认知负荷下，根据兼容或不兼容的特性词汇对身体形态进行分类。贝叶斯多级建模反应时间表明，由特性线索的兼容性引起的干扰对工作记忆资源的并发需求不敏感。这些发现表明，身体形态与特性的关联是资源消耗较低且在此意义上更为“自动化”的。在实验2（N = 39）和3（N = 70）中，我们要求参与者在与任务无关的身体形态背景下对特性词汇进行分类。在这些条件下，无论并发负荷如何，均未发现干扰的证据。这些结果提示，尽管身体形态和特性概念可以以自动化的方式相联系，但此类过程对更广泛的环境因素敏感，例如信息呈现的顺序。