Zombies, Ouija, and the Ideomotor Effect: When
Implicit Cognition Turns Explicit
Helene Gauchou, Ronald A Rensink,
and Sidney Fels.
Abstracts of the Association for the
Scientific Study of Consciousness
[ASSC 16, Brighton, England. June
2010].
Ideomotor actions are
movements or behaviours that are unconsciously initiated, usually without an
accompanying sense of conscious control. The question investigated here is
whether ideomotor actions can also express implicit long-term semantic memory, which
is not available to conscious recall. We compared accuracy of answers to yes /
no questions using two response modalities: volitional report and ideomotor
response (Ouija board response). Results showed that when participants believed
they knew the answer, responses in the two modalities were similar. But when
they believed they were guessing, accuracy fell to chance for volitional report
(50%), but remained significantly higher for Ouija response (65%). These
results suggest that implicit semantic memory can be expressed through
ideomotor actions, possibly via a nonconscious "zombie" system that
can express itself via motor control when conscious override has been removed.
We examine several control conditions that rule out several possible alternative
explanations. Finally, we discuss
the extent to which this approach could form the basis of a new methodology for
studying implicit processes in perception and cognition.