The process-dissociation procedure has been used in a variety of experiment
al contexts to assess the contributions of conscious and unconscious proces
ses to task performance. To evaluate whether motivation affects estimates o
f conscious and unconscious processes, participants were given incentives t
o follow inclusion and exclusion instructions in a perception task and a me
mory task. Relative to a control condition in which no performance incentiv
es were given, the results fur the perception task indicated that incentive
s increased the participants' ability to exclude previously presented infor
mation, which in turn both increased the estimate of conscious processes an
d decreased the estimate of unconscious processes. However, the results als
o indicated that incentives did not influence estimates of conscious or unc
onscious processes in the memory task. The findings suggest that the proces
s-dissociation procedure is relatively immune to influences of motivation w
hen used with a memory task;, but that caution should be exercised when the
process-dissociation is used with a perception task. (C) 1999 Academic Pre
ss.