Conscious and unconscious processes: The effects of motivation

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.