Frankel, Adam (8/14) Monetary priming at conscious and nonconscious levels of prime accessibility and motivational behavior (Philip S. Wong, Ph.D.; Benjamin A. Saunders, Ph.D.;Kevin B. Meehan, Ph.D.)
The current study was designed to investigate how motivational behavior is impacted by positively and negatively valenced affective priming cues at conscious and nonconscious levels of prime accessibility as measured by participants' performance on a memory recall task. Greater or lesser amounts of monetary reward and monetary loss represented positively and negatively valenced affective priming cues, respectively. Fifty-five participants completed a computer based memory recall task with 120 trials utilizing a 2 x 2 x 2 within-participants design, incorporating 8 possible combinations of monetary win or loss, monetary amount ($1 or 1¢), and conscious or nonconscious level of prime accessibility. Memory performance was significantly better when participants were primed with monetary win cues than with monetary loss cues. Moreover, priming larger monetary win cues resulted in significantly better memory performance than smaller monetary win cues. Contrary to expectations, priming larger monetary loss cues resulted in significantly better participant memory performance than smaller monetary loss cues. Finally, priming monetary cues at a nonconscious level of prime accessibility resulted in significantly better participant performance than monetary cues primed at a conscious level of prime accessibility. The findings of the present study suggest that different degrees of positively and negatively valenced affective priming cues represented by monetary reward and monetary loss cues, respectively, could be discriminated nonconsciously, eliciting distinct levels of motivational behavior on a memory recall task.
