The Stimulus’ Orienting Function May Play an Important Role in IRAP Performance: Supportive Evidence from an Eye-Tracking Study of Brands

Abstract

The Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) has been typically used to access behavioral biases to relations that the participants learned throughout their history of social interactions. Recent research has highlighted the role of the stimulus orienting function on IRAP performance. The present study used the IRAP to assess preference biases for smartphone application (app) icons, namely WhatsApp and Messenger, and intended to check if these biases correspond to the orienting function of these stimuli in a visual search paradigm monitored by eye tracking. The IRAP presented relations between the WhatsApp and Messenger icons and happy or angry facial expressions. The visual search task had two steps: in Step 1, matrices of app icons were designed to emulate smartphone screens, and the participant was instructed to find either the WhatsApp or the Messenger icon; in Step 2, happy or angry faces were presented as targets in matrices of pictures of neutral faces that functioned as distractors. Participants were more prompted to respond Yes than No to the relation between the WhatsApp icon and happy facial expressions in IRAP trials, and showed ambivalent bias to the Messenger icon. Regarding the visual search performance, participants' were faster to find the WhatsApp target than to find the Messenger target. In addition, they were faster to find the happy targets than the angry targets. Results from the current study corroborate the hypothesis that the stimulus orienting function may play an important role on IRAP performance and, as a result, are supportive to the Differential Arbitrarily Applicable Relational Responding Effects (DAARRE) model.Keywords IRAP . eye tracking . WhatsApp . Messenger . facial expressions . orienting function . DAARRE model Research on consumer experience applies implicit measures to estimate the influence of brands on consumers' attitudes, judgments, and preferences (Maison, Greenwald, & Bruin, 2001, 2004. The most widely used and well-known procedure is the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which has been

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“…This, at least in part, could explain the dominance of the color-color trial-type over the remaining three. A number of recent studies have provided experimental evidence in support of this DAARRE model explanation and the role of orienting functions (Bortoloti et al, 2020;Finn et al, 2018, Experiment 3;Finn et al, 2019;Pinto et al, 2020;Schmidt et al, 2021). We will return to the important issue of empirical testing in greater detail later in the article.…”

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“…In this sense, during consistent blocks this trialtype could be defined as involving a maximum level of coherence because all of the responses to the stimuli, both orienting and relational, are confirmatory. During inconsistent blocks, however, participants are required to choose the "False" response option, which does not cohere with any of the other orienting or relational responses on that trial-type, and this difference in coherence across blocks of trials yields relatively large difference scores (see Pinto et al, 2020, for a recent study that provides evidence for differential orienting responses on the IRAP using eye tracking as a measure).…”

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“…Speci cally, happy faces and fearful faces were presented with semantically related words (i.e., happiness and fear words). We chose faces because previous research had reported differential trial-type effects using such stimuli (Bortoloti et al, 2019;Kavanagh et al, 2019;Perez et al, 2019;Pinto et al 2020;Schmidt et al, 2021; see also Bortoloti et al, 2020).…”

“…Kavanagh et al, 2019; Schmidt et al, 2020). The STTDE, speci cally, has been consistently replicated across different domains, such as colour-colour over shape-shape(Finn et al, 2018), faceface over pen-pen(Kavanagh et al, 2019), happy-symbol-positive-word over fearful-symbol-negativeword(Perez et al, 2019); happy-face-happy-symbol over negative-emotion-negative-symbol(Bortoloti et al, 2019; see alsoBortoloti et al, 2020), happy-face-preferred-icon over angry-face-indifferent-icon(Pinto et al, 2020); and opposing patterns of in-group over out-group positivity bias(Hughes et al, 2017).…”