Nighthawks Open Institutional Repository

22. A conceptual replication of the "automatic writing" phenomenon

People’s actions are often influenced by their surroundings, with or without their awareness. For example, in a conversation, a person’s choice of words or topics may be directly related to something they heard recently. With deliberate effort, we can also ignore these influences. Our study will investigate whether or not being distracted causes people to be more susceptible to automatic influences. The hypothesis of this study is that people’s writing will be more influenced by what they hear when they are distracted. Participants were tasked with typing random words or phrases while deliberately avoiding anything related to a simultaneous auditory stimulus. In another condition, participants had an additional visual task to further distract them. We predict that the words written by participants will be closely related to what they hear despite instructions to ignore the audio, and even more so when they are distracted. The results of this study would indicate that working memory has a role in priming.