It can be seen from this example that implicit cognition is involved with many of the different mental activities and everyday situations in people's daily lives.
[4] There are many processes in which implicit memory works, which include learning, our social cognition, and our problem-solving skills.
The IAT is designed to detect unconscious associations between concepts, making it a useful assessment in the field of social psychology.
There is significant academic and popular debate regarding its validity, reliability, and usefulness in assessing implicit bias.
A study was conducted with amnesiac patients in an attempt to demonstrate that amnesiac patients that were unable to learn a list of words or pictures when their performance was tested were able to complete or put together fragmented words and incomplete pictures.
[4] Graf and Masson (1993) conducted a study where they showed participants a list with both famous and non-famous names.
This supports implicit cognition because the participants began to unconsciously associate the non-famous names with famous people.
It was found that people typically place men and women close to each other, to make little families formed with the figures of a woman, a man, and children.
Females on the other hand it is seen that women perceive their social views and values as more of the belonging or liking scale in terms of their closeness to one another.
The way that this plays a role in implicit cognition is because of all of these actions people do unconsciously, or they are unaware that they are making this decision.
That is implicit cognition coming into play, the mind will then go based on ethical and similar situations when interacting with a certain thought.
Implicit on one hand is obtained through social aspects and association, while explicit cognition is gained through propositional attitudes or beliefs of certain thoughts,[19] Implicit cognition can be incorporated with a mixture of attention, goals, self-association, and at times even motivational processes.
Researchers have used different methods to test these theories of behavior's correlation with implicit cognition.
Since published, approximately ten years or so, it has been widely used in influencing research on implicit attitudes.
Nock et al. (2010) implied that implicit association with death and or suicide initiates a final process when deciding how to cope with these extreme measures.
[24] Since schizophrenia is widely varied and has different characteristics, we cannot quite measure the outcome of implicit cognition.
Implicit cognition refers to perceptual, memory, comprehension, and performance processes that occur through unconscious awareness.
[25] For example, when a patient is discharged after surgery, the effects of the anesthesia can cause abnormal behaviors without any conscious awareness.
According to Wiers et al. (2006), some scholars argue implicit cognition is misinterpreted and could be used to improve behaviors while others highlight the dangers of it.
Research studies have shown implicit cognition is a strong predictor for several issues like substance abuse, misconduct, and mental disorders.
[26] These inherent thoughts are influenced by early adolescent experiences primarily a negative impact from culture.
A recent study suggests individuals who have experienced a difficult upbringing develop schemata of fear as well as anxiety and will react almost immediately when they feel threatened.
This concept was examined through both implicit and explicit perspectives by measuring the self-esteem of paranoia and depression patients.
Previous research suggests that negative implicit cognition is not the symptom of depression and paranoia, but it is an antecedent for the onset.
Another study found a substantial association between adverse self-questioning in implicit cognition and depression.
Schizophrenia patients and healthy individuals differ in associative representation pertaining to themselves in neuroticism features.
An implicit cognition associated with self-task was applied in one experiment to unveil any suspicious behavior of people who might attempt suicide.
This study found patients who were released from mental hospitals showed significant implicit association to attempt suicide.
The Implicit Association Task would predict whether a patient was likely to attempt suicide depending on their response.
However, implicit association with death will show those most at risk for attempting suicide because this individual is looking for the best solution for ending their stress.