Expectancy Violation: Climate Change Associations May Reveal Underlying Brain-Evoked Responses of Implicit Attitudes

The development of programs and campaigns to promote climate change awareness and actions should account for implicit attitudes to make them effective. Alongside behavioural measures, it is important to investigate and understand the neural mechanisms underlying unconscious beliefs, and opinions and how external factors can influence them. Therefore, this study administered a Single-Category Implicit Association Test to 22 healthy volunteers while acquiring EEG signals. After an automatic preprocessing pipeline was applied, 1000ms-long epochs were extracted from cleaned EEG data for target words only. Latencies and amplitudes were computed in specific brain regions and time intervals for the P1, N1, P2 (both occipital and frontal), P3, and N4 (both frontal and frontocentral) event-related potentials (ERPs). Statistical analysis has highlighted that incongruent associations elicited significantly shorter N1 latencies, which may be due to stimuli familiarisation, longer P3 latencies, which can be related to the allocation of more attentional resources, and larger N4 amplitudes, which suggest greater cognitive efforts. Correlation analysis has also found a significant relationship between the amplitude of the N4 and explicit behaviour. These results suggest that ERPs can highlight different mental processes involved in violating social expectations towards climate change and that their features may be used to support behavioural measures in assessing implicit attitudes more reliably.