Ironic effects as reflexive responses: Evidence from word frequency effects on involuntary subvocalizations

EEG Correlates of Involuntary Cognitions in the Reflexive Imagery Task

“…We should add that it is unlikely that RIT effects stem from subjects having long, intentional thought sequences such as, "I should not think of the name of the object, which is X, " for, on many trials, the effect arises too quickly to be caused by strategic processing (Allen et al, 2013;Cho et al, 2014). Consistent with this observation, in one version of the RIT, subjects reported on the majority of trials (∼70%) that the involuntary subvocalization felt "immediate" (Bhangal et al, 2015).…”

“…as a result of various factors, including (a) subjects basing their reports on a strategy (see discussion in Morsella et al, 2009b), and (b) inaccurate memories of fleeting conscious contents (Block, 2007). Given both the reliability and robustness of the RIT effect (as perhaps experienced by the reader in response to our example involving the triangle), and given corroboratory data (e.g., Bhangal et al, 2015;Cushing et al, 2017), we do not believe that the well-known limitations regarding self-report undermine the validity of our behavioral data.…”

“…On the majority of the trials (86% in Allen et al, 2013;87% in Cho et al, 2014;and 73% in Merrick et al, 2015), subjects fail to suppress such subvocalizations. Subjects report on the majority of trials (∼70%) that the involuntary subvocalization feels "immediate" (Bhangal et al, 2015).…”

“…A third kind of behavioral evidence for the occurrence of the imagery stems from a variant of the basic RIT by Bhangal et al (2015). In this variant of the RIT, some visual objects had names that are high in frequency (e.g., "door") while others had names that are lower in frequency (e.g., "kite").…”

“…Evidence that the RIT effect is involuntary stems not only from subjects' reports during debriefing but also from analysis of their trial-by-trial data. First, as mentioned above, the nature of the involuntary subvocalization in the basic version of the RIT is influenced systematically by a stimulus dimension such as word frequency (Bhangal et al, 2015). If this pattern of results were an artifact of experimental demand, it would require for subjects to know subtle ways in which this stimulus dimension should influence the latencies of the behavioral response.…”