Image or Real? Altering the Mental Imagery of Subliminal Stimuli Differentiates Explicit and Implicit Attitudes

Recent research has shown that implicit and explicit attitudes are uniquely sensitive to different types of information sources. We predicted that altering the mental imagery of subliminal stimuli, which are presented below conscious awareness, would lead to discrepancies between implicit and explicit attitudes. Using a subliminal mere exposure paradigm, participants were subliminally exposed 30 times to the figure of either a rabbit or a duck. Before exposure, however, we altered participants’ mental images verbally so that they were either consistent or inconsistent with the subliminal stimulus. As expected, we found evidence that implicit and explicit attitudes were dissociated when participants’ mental images were inconsistent with the subliminal stimuli: Implicit attitudes reflected the actually presented figure, whereas explicit attitudes reflected participants’ mental images. Thus, it seems that mental imagery influences the development of explicit attitudes, while real information influences the development of implicit attitudes.