Page 153 - Emotions through the eyes of our closest living relatives- Exploring attentional and behavioral mechanisms

Validation of the Pictorial Implicit Association Test
Introduction
Since the publication of the seminal paper by Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz (1998), the Implicit Association Test (IAT) has been one of the most well-established tasks to measure implicit attitudes (Cunningham et al., 2001; Greenwald et al., 2003, 2009; Lane et al., 2007). Implicit tasks such as the IAT are crucial for providing a window into unconscious processes that drive behavior. Unfortunately, most versions of the IAT require comprehension of written or spoken language, thereby limiting its usability in non-verbal or illiterate populations such as young children, clinical populations such as individuals on the autism spectrum or cognitively impaired individuals, and possibly in comparative research with non-human animals as well. To offer researchers who work with these populations an adaptation to verbal IATs, we developed a fully pictorial, intuitive implicit association test, and validated it against its classical counterpart in a population of children and adults.
The original IAT has received extensive psychometric evaluation and is a widely
used tool to assess implicit attitudes and stereotypes (Cunningham et al., 2001;
Greenwald et al., 2003, 2009; Lane et al., 2007). It measures the strength of implicit
associations between two concepts (e.g., names of African-Americans vs. White
Americans) and two attribute dimensions (e.g., pleasant vs. unpleasant words) by
comparing reaction times in a categorization task consisting of a series of testing blocks.
In the practice blocks, participants learn to categorize exemplars of the concepts and
attributes into their superordinate categories. For example, they categorize a name
such as “Tyrone” as African-American and “Hannah” as White-American, and a word 7 such as “happiness” as pleasant and “suffering” as unpleasant. In the critical blocks,
these superordinate categories are combined. For instance, in the first critical block
participants categorize names and faces into the combined superordinate categories
“White” + “unpleasant” and “Black” + “pleasant”. In the subsequent critical block(s),
this combination is reversed (e.g., “White” + “unpleasant”). In general, participants
respond faster in critical blocks congruent with their implicit associations, and
slower in incongruent critical blocks (Greenwald et al., 1998). Importantly, in order to
complete a typical IAT, a good understanding of written and/or spoken language is
necessary, as the task activates implicit attitudes through the use of words and names
representing (a subset of) the superordinate categories.
Several studies have made elegant adaptations to the IAT to partly overcome the necessity for understanding written or spoken language, especially within the developmental sciences. For instance, one IAT used pictures of flowers and insects
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