Photo: flickr
The Freiburg psychologist and neuroscientist Dr. Bastian Schiller and a team at the University of Basel in Switzerland are the first to have discovered the subconscious processes in the brain and the order in which they occur that determine how humans process social information such as likability or antipathy.
The researchers employed the Implicit Association Test (IAT) in their study. The subjects reacted to positive and negative words and concepts that they associated with their own or a foreign group.
While the subjects- a group of soccer fans - were responding to concepts such a "love" or "death," or the names of players on their own versus the opposing team, the researchers measured their brain waves on an electroencephalogram. They aimed to investigate individual information processing steps and their duration during subconscious social assessments. To do this, they analyzed functional "microstates" in the brain. These are short phases -- some lasting just a few milliseconds -- during which a neuronal network is activated to carry a particular processing step.
According to Schiller, "This study demonstrates the potential of modern electrical neuroimaging in helping to better understand the origin and time course of socially relevant processes in the human brain."
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Source material from Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
