Why a standard IAT effect cannot provide evidence for association formation: the role of similarity construction

Moran and Bar-Anan (Moran, T., & Bar-Anan, Y. (2013). The effect of object-valence relations on automatic evaluation. Cognition and Emotion, 27(4), 743-752) demonstrated that evaluations on a direct measure reflected information on both US valence and CS-US relations, whereas evaluations on an indirect measure (IAT) reflected only information on US valence. This dissociation between measures supposedly tapping into propositional and associative processes apparently supports dual process models of EC. In the present study, we present an alternative explanation of this pattern, based on an interpretation of IAT effects in terms of flexible similarity construction processes. According to this account, processing draws on those features that discriminate between target categories, and help to align targets with attributes in the compatible block. Across two experiments, we consistently found that IAT effects did not reflect rigid associations, but instead depended on whichever information could be used for similarity constructions between targets and attributes in different variants of the IAT. The findings are discussed with regard to theoretical models of EC as well as in reference to prominent accounts of IAT performance.